THE NAYA HAYE.
“If your friend does not come soon, gentlemen, I shall have to cut
the country, even at the risk of losing your society. The Khamsin is
getting to be more than I can bear,” Oswald Ferris said one night,
as they lingered under the palm trees that skirted the camp that was
pitched near the shores of the Nile in Upper Egypt.
The dozen men who composed the party were disposed in various
picturesque attitudes about the camp. The sport of the day had been
fishing, and several were collected around a huge fire preparing
supper, the air being highly impregnated with the odor of broiling
fish. The clear soft moonlight and starlight glimmered down upon the
animated scene, upon the stalwart forms and handsome faces of the men
who were laughing and jesting in high enjoyment of the scene and the
hour, unmindful of the grave, preoccupied faces of the two Americans
whom they had become habituated to regard as deaths heads at the feast.
Leaning lightly against a stately palm tree gazing in the brilliant
moonlight at the lotus lillies rocking on the breast of the storied
Nile, was Talbot Strangemore. He had been thinking sadly of his
beautiful dead bride, but at those words from Oswald Ferris he turned
his head and looked at him.
Khamsin--the hot wind from the desert--had been blowing several weeks
now, and as Ferris said, it was hard to bear. It was oppressive and
unhealthy in the extreme, and every one began to chafe at the delay.
The sweltering days and nights made them hot and impatient, but until
now no one had spoken out his discontent.
The chief laughed good-naturedly at the complaint of Ferris.
“You are right, Ferris. The Khamsin is hard to bear,” he said. “One
seems to scorch and shrivel in the intense heat. I cannot imagine what
detains John Armstrong so long. We expected he would have joined us
several weeks ago. If he does not put in an appearance by to-morrow, I
think we shall have to give him up and cut the country as you say. We
cannot remain but a short while longer any-way, for it will soon be the
season for the annual inundation of the country by the over-flow of the
Nile.”
“You cannot get away too soon to please me!” growled Ferris. And the
good-natured Wilson said again, “We will wait until to-morrow anyway,”
and dropped the subject.
It was late when they retired that night, and before any one had closed
his eyes in sleep a piercing cry of horror startled the camp.
In an instant every man had sprung from his rude camp-bed to the ground.
“What is it?” they began to exclaim, and some one answered, quickly:
“It was Strangemore that shouted. Let us see what ails him.”
Pale as a ghost and shivering with horror, Talbot was standing by his
couch holding one end of the coverlet clutched in his hand. He turned
his burning eyes upon them.
“There was an asp in my bed--see!” he said, hoarsely.
And there, sure enough, upon the white bed lay the famed serpent that
brought welcome death to beauteous, conquered Cleopatra--but this one
was dead--slain in all its deadly power by a heavy blunt instrument
that Talbot still held mechanically in his hand.
“Great God, how did it come there?” Wilson cried, excitedly, and then
he suddenly saw a small, strong wooden box protruding from the pillow.
He snatched it hurriedly out.
“Why this is my own box,” he said. “The box where I had placed a
specimen of the deadly asp, _naya haye_, in order to take it to a
museum in England. It is empty. A hole has been drilled in the side and
lightly covered with thin pasteboard through which the serpent has made
its way. Great heavens, it looks like a premeditated deed! What does it
mean, Strangemore?”
“Some one has tried to kill me,” Talbot answered, hoarsely. “When I
threw back the cover the asp lay coiled in my bed. Fortunately the
moonlight was so clear and brilliant that I distinguished the horrible
serpent and quickly snatched up this heavy bolt and dispatched him.”
He was shuddering with horror. The shock to his nerves had been great,
and his eyes gleamed wildly out of his marble white features as he
looked around upon their horror-struck faces. He saw that only one was
missing.
Suddenly Wilson exclaimed:
“Ferris was looking at the asp in the box this evening. Where is he
now?”
They found him lying quietly in bed and apparently asleep. The men
shook him roughly.
“He must be dead or he could not have slept through the uproar we have
made,” they said.
But at their rough handling he started, broad awake, sat up in bed, and
gazed at them in a dull, dazed way.
“What is it? Why have you wakened me? Has anything happened?” he
stammered.
Wilson took him firmly by the shoulder.
“Yes, something has happened,” he said, sharply. “Ferris, you were
looking at the asp in the box this evening. What did you do with it?”
Ferris looked at him in wonder.
“I did nothing with it. I was merely peering through the glass top at
your dangerous pet, and I came away and left it under the great rock
where you always keep it. Has it gotten away from you?” he asked.
“Yes,” Wilson answered.
“Well, I always told you it would, you know, and I am glad it has done
so at last without harming any one, as I always had the most horrible
fears that it would do.”
“But the strangest part of it all was, that when it made its marvelous
escape it carried my box with it,” said Wilson, drily.
“No,” exclaimed Oswald Ferris.
“Yes, and the strangest part of it yet was that the asp, box and all,
went and hid under the pillow of Talbot Strangemore, your friend. And
this same cunning serpent of old Nile cut a hole in the side of the box
which he covered with thin paste-board in order to make his exit easy
at the right moment.”
In the brilliant moonlight that flooded the scene with radiance he saw
the men’s faces gazing at him with dark threatening looks that made the
blood run coldly through his veins.
He gave a gasp and a shiver and tried to brave it out.
“You are jesting with me, surely, and it is an unseemly hour for
pleasantries,” he said, in a tone bristling with offense. “Have you
wakened me from sleep at midnight to tell me this ridiculous tale?”
Wilson gave him a glance of flashing contempt. The men crowded closely
around him, casting scornful looks upon Ferris, while Wilson, who
seemed to have constituted himself the spokesman, said, sarcastically:
“Is there anything ridiculous in the fact that Strangemore found that
horrible poisonous serpent coiled in his bed when he was about to
retire?”
“In his bed, oh, horrible! Then poor Strangemore must be dead,” Ferris
exclaimed, in well simulated distress and horror, but with a wild throb
of gladness and relief at his heart.
No one said yea or nay at his words, but Wilson continued, sternly:
“I am forced to believe that you, Ferris, placed that serpent in
Strangemore’s bed with murderous intent, although you have pretended to
be his friend. We have watched you two Americans, I and my comrades,
and we know that you two are linked together by some mysterious bond,
and that you mutually hate each other. Is it not so, my men?”
“Aye! Aye! Aye!” rang shrilly on the hot sweltering air of the June
night.
“I know that you took away the box with the asp this evening,” Wilson
went on, “I said nothing for I believed that you had done it for a mere
joke to alarm me over the loss of my deadly pet. But this horrible
_eclaircissement_ to-night has taught me better. You deliberately laid
your plans for the death of Talbot Strangemore, whom you both hate
and fear for some unexplained cause. Do you dare deny your murderous
attempt?”
“I dare deny it because I am innocent. I had no cause of quarrel with
Strangemore. He was my friend,” asserted Ferris boldly, yet inwardly
quaking with fear.
“You are a liar!” Wilson cried stormily, and one after another the
voices of the men caught it up and the fierce accusation rang out upon
the air.
Someone ran and brought Strangemore and placed them face to face. The
would-be murderer recoiled with a cry of fear when he beheld his living
foe.
“Strangemore, I thought you dead!” he exclaimed, and the other
answered, with limitless contempt:
“It is not your fault that I am alive!”
“Speak, Strangemore,” cried the leader. “Do you believe that this
coward and villain quaking here, placed that serpent in your bed with
the deliberate intention of destroying you?”
There was a moment of the deepest, most intense silence, and then
Talbot Strangemore lifting his hand solemnly to heaven, answered firmly:
“Before God I believe it.”
“That is enough,” said the spokesman, and he turned back to Ferris who
had broken into fierce denials and imprecations.
“Listen,” he said. “In your own land they have a terrible and summary
method of punishing offenders such as you are--men guilty of the
blackest treason and iniquity. I confess that in your case I could
contemplate that method with unalloyed satisfaction. I see no reason
why we foreigners here under the distant skies of Egypt should not have
recourse to American methods to punish this native of a land which
he has dishonored. My comrades, what say you? Shall we not resolve
ourselves into a court of Judge Lynch?”
“Aye, aye,” the answer rang loudly, with but two dissenting voices,
and those two the would-be murderer’s and his noble victim. But in the
next moment the exciting scene came to an abrupt pause by a sudden
interruption.
“Ho, ho, ho!” rang two blended voices, startling the actors in the
drama being played, and looking quickly around they confronted two
strong men who had stolen unobserved upon them.
“What, John Armstrong and his servant!” they cried, and forgetting
Ferris and his sin for a moment, they gathered around the new comer
plying him with eager questions.
Oswald Ferris drew a long breath of relief and crouched upon the ground
by the side of the camp-bed, hoping that the coming of the long
expected Armstrong would turn the thoughts of his stern judges in some
more kindly direction.
He knew that it would be worse than useless to endeavor to escape, and
cursing his evil luck, he waited in dead silence, and with the cold dew
of terror beading his brow, for the finale of his attempted crime.
“Curse me, what a bungler I was,” he said, “I was sure that the serpent
would do its deadly work surely, and then I would have removed the
tell-tale box and with it all trace of my crime. Fate has played
me a cursed trick, and I shall most probably pay the penalty of my
mistake with my life. So, Sibyl, you will be avenged after all, and my
vengeance upon you will have been the primal cause of my own death.”
It was horrible sitting there so still under the burning stars of Egypt
and looking death in the face. Oh how he cursed the memory of the woman
who through love had brought all this awful doom upon him. It was most
unfortunate that the light coquette had ever crossed his path. His
passionate, intense nature, fierce and jealous to the last degree had
staked everything upon her, and the loss of her had made him a fiend.
Everything good and noble had seemed to die within him. Like the hot
Khamsin as it swept across the desert plains blighting and burning
everything in its destructive course, so incurable despair had burned
away everything that had been noble within him.