All might have been well, and both seamen might have reached the Puncher
again with dignity and grace, had they not entered Adra, past the
only jail in that part of Arabia. And an Arab jail being rarer and one
percent more evil than any other evil thing there is, the two of them
quite naturally paused to make its closest possible acquaintance.
“Look out for vermin!” cautioned Curley, standing on tiptoe to peer in
through the close-spaced iron bars.
They forgot the dog. The jail, for the moment, challenged all their
waking senses, the olfactory by no means least.
“Can you see anything?” asked Byng.
Before Crothers could answer him, a snarl, then a yap, then a quick,
determined growl gave warning of the terrier's interest in something
else than fleas.
He had been scratching himself peacefully a moment earlier; now, like a
bower anchor taking charge, he ripped the chain through Byng's hand and
was off--chin, back and tail in one straight, striving line--in full
chase of a pariah.
The yellow cur yapped its agony of fear; the nearest hundred and odd
mangy monsters of the gutter took up the chorus; within five seconds
of the start there was the Puncher's mascot racing after one abominable
scavenger, and after him in just as hot pursuit there raced the whole
street-cleaning force of Adra--tongues out, eyes blazing, and their mean
thin barks all working overtime.
“Good-by, Scamp!” groaned Byng, estimating rapidly.
“Not yet it ain't!” said Crothers, grabbing Byng's arm and nearly
tearing out the muscles.
It was a crude way of rousing Byng's latent speed, both of thought and
movement, but it worked. Before Joe could swear, even, Crothers was
off like the wind, with Joe after him, using the string of oaths he had
meant for Crothers on the sand that gave under him and made him stumble
at every other stride.
Adra turned out, as a colony of prairie dogs might from planless
burrows; only these had more venom in their bite than prairie dogs and
came from structural instead of natural, from flea-bepeppered instead of
grass-grown dirt. Man, woman and child--the grown men armed, the women
veiled in dirt-brown, some of them, and some (mostly the better-looking)
unveiled and unashamed, the little children mostly naked and colored
with all the human hues there are--raced, yelling, through a swarm of
flies in hot pursuit. Never since Shem's great-grandson gat the Arab
race was there a procession like it.
Behind its mud-and-Masonry decrepit wall that guards only the seaward
side, Adra straggles quite a distance desertward; and there are winding
streets enough to hide an army in, provided that the army did not mind
the fleas. Scamp, view-halloaing his utmost, led that most amazing hunt
a quite considerable circuit before other men and dogs, arriving from a
dozen different directions, set a limit to his unobstructed movement.
He knew what he was after, but they did not; they had come to see. For a
moment they seemed to think that Scamp was the object of the chase, and
a dozen guns of a dozen different kinds and dates were aimed at him.
And then, as consciousness dawns on a man recovering from chloroform,
there swept over their lethargic Eastern brains the simultaneous idea
that Curley Crothers and Joe Byng were the real quarry; and--again like
men recovering from chloroform--they did not quite know what to do.
Should they slay, there was the Puncher to be reckoned with; and the
Puncher's port quick-firers could be seen commanding Adra by any man who
cared to climb the wall.
Besides, an Arab's hospitality is proverbial. He very seldom kills a
visitor on sight.
On the other hand a man, and particularly a British sailor, who runs
has reason, as a rule. Therefore these two men were evidently guilty.
Therefore they must not escape. In five seconds the affair had changed
from a spectacular amusement, with Adra's population in the role of
super-heated audience, to a hunt of Crothers and Joe Byng.
Within ten seconds each of the sailors lay with his face pressed hard
into the sand and at least a dozen Arabs sitting on him. Scamp--utterly
forgotten now by all except the sailors--still behind the one stray
pariah and ahead of all the rest but beginning to appreciate the fact
that he was hunted, and beginning to feel spent--raced on, took three
sharp turns in close succession, and was gathered all unwilling in the
arms of an enormous black man who snatched him from the very teeth
of the following pack and dispersed them, howling, by means of
well-directed kicks.
“Ah seed you yesterday, Ah did,” said his deliverer in English; and,
recalling principle, the terrier bit at him--only to find himself
muzzled by a horny, huge fist that caressed even while it rendered
impotent.
“Ah'm fond of little dogs! Ah'm English!”
Scamp understood nothing of the conversation, but with canine instinct
realized that he was safe; and after that he was satisfied to lie and
pant. With five red inches of tongue hanging out, and no sign whatever
of his white-uniformed guardians to trouble him, a black man's arms were
as good as any other place; he did not waste half a thought on Byng and
Crothers.
But Byng, three turnings back, spat filthy sand out of his mouth the
moment an Arab deemed it safe to leave off sitting on his head, looked
wildly around for Crothers, and bellowed--
“Where's the pup?”
Crothers, spitting out sand, too, twenty yards behind where the swifter
Byng had fallen, called back:
“Dunno. Whistle him!”
Byng tried to whistle, and the Arabs mistook the effort for a signal. In
an instant both men were face-downward again, struggling for breath
and clawing at the dirt. Then worse befell. The gentleman whose brown
anatomy had suffered from the seamen's feet and fists just previous to
their invasion of the town limped up with his eye teeth showing and his
flapping cotton raiment still unmended where the dog had torn it. Any
other wrath, however awful, could be nothing but the shadow of his state
of mind; and since he knew the more vindictive portions of the Koran all
by heart, and was quoting as he came, there was little need of words to
illustrate further his attitude.
He seemed to be a person of authority. An Arab town or village is a
democracy in which each free man has his say; not even a sheik can
overrule the vote of a majority, and this man was no sheik. But rage
and self-assertion will generally exercise a certain weight in tribal
councils, and the crowd in this case was too doubtful of the facts to
have any settled notions of its own.
“To the jail with them!” the new arrival almost shrieked, and about a
dozen in the crowd took up the cry--
“To jail with them!”
“Infidels! Worshipers of dogs! Wine-drinkers! Eaters of pig flesh! Dogs
and the sons of dogs--what mothers gave them birth? Are your hands,
True-believers, fit bonds for them? To the jail! To the jail that Abdul
Hamid caused his men to build for such as these!”
He stooped and looked deliberately to make sure that Crothers could not
break away, then came closer and spat on him, saving half his spittle
with impartial forethought for the struggling Byng, who looked up
in time to see what was in store for him. Being spat on is even less
exhilarating than it sounds or looks, and Byng waxed speechless after
passing through a many-worded stage of blasphemy.
Crothers, the larger of the two and by six brawny inches more
phlegmatic, bode his time in silence, so that neither of them spoke a
word while they were hustled and cuffed along the street between the
unbaked brick hovels. It was not until the reinforced iron door of
Adra's one stone building slammed on them that either of them said a
word.