"Hello, haven't I met you somewhere before?" he asked, and she laughed and pirouetted, flaring the dress.
"Do you like it?" she asked. He nodded silently and then asked, "Are we going somewhere special?"
"The Ras's feast, didn't you know?"
not sure I can stan another of his feasts, don't know which is more dangerous an Italian attack or that liquid dynamite he serves."
"You'll have to be there you're one of the heroes of the great victory, and Jake grunted and returned his attention to Priscilla the Pig's internal processes.
"Have you found the trouble?"
"No." Jake sighed with resignation.
"I've taken her to pieces and put her together again and I can't find a thing." He stood back, shaking his head and wiping his greasy hands on a wad of cotton waste. "I don't know. I just don't know."
"Have you tried starting her again?"
"No point in that not until I find and cure the trouble."
"Try,"said Vicky, and he grinned at her.
"It's no use but to humour you." He stooped to the crank handle, and Priscilla fired at the first swing, caught and ran smoothly, purring like a great hump-backed cat in front of the fire.
"My God." Jake stepped back and stared in amazement.
"There's just no logic to it."
"She's a lady," Vicky explained.
"You know that and there isn't necessarily logic in the way a lady behaves." He turned to face her directly and grinned at her, such a knowing expression in his eyes that she felt herself flushing.
"I'm beginning to find that out," he said, and stepped towards her, but she raised both hands protectively.
"You'll put grease on this dress-" "If I were to bath first?"
"Bath," she ordered. "And then we'll talk again, mister."
In the last few minutes of daylight, a rider had come down the gorge, clattering and sliding on the rough footing, and then hitting the level ground and galloping into the Ras's camp on a blown and lathered horse.
Sara Sagud took the message he carried, came flying up to the cluster of tents under the flat-topped camel-thorn trees and burst into Vicky Camberwell's tent waving the folded cablegram, without dreaming of announcing her entrance.
Vicky was deep in a bearlike enfolding embrace into which Jake Barton had taken her moments before, and the interruption came just as Vicky was abandoning herself to the pleasure of the moment. Jake towered over her, freshly scrubbed and smelling of carbolic soap, with his hair still wet and newly combed. Vicky broke out of his arms and turned furiously to the girl.
"Oh!" exclaimed Sara, with the natural interest and fascination of a born conspirator discovering a fresh intrigue.
"You are busy."
"Yes, I am, "snapped Vicky, cheeks aflame with embarrassment and confusion.
"I'm sorry, Miss Camberwell. But I thought this message must be important-" and Vicky's irritation faded, as she saw the cablegram.
"I thought you would want it." Vicky snatched it from her, broke the seal and read avidly. Her anger faded as she read, and she looked up with shining eyes at Sara.
"You were right thank you, my dear," and she spun back to Jake, dancing up to him and flinging both arms around his neck, laughing and gay.
"Hey," Jake laughed with her, holding her awkwardly in front of the girl, "What's this all about?"
"It's from my editor," she told him.
"My story about the attack at the Wells was an international scoop.
Headlines around the world and there is to be an emergency session of the League of Nations." Sara snatched the cable form back from her, and read it as though by right.
"This is what my father believed you could do for us, Miss Camberwell for our land and our people." Sara was weeping, fat oily tears breaking from the dark gazelle eyes and clinging in her long lashes. "Now the world knows. Now they will come to save us from the tyranny." The girl's faith in the triumph of good over evil was childlike, and she pulled Vicky from Jake's arms and embraced her instead.
"Oh, you have given us a chance again. We will always be grateful to you." Her tears smeared Vicky's cheek, and she drew back, sniffing wetly, and wiped her own tears from Vicky's face with the palm of her hand. "We will never forget you," she said, and then smiled through the tears. "We must go and tell my grandfather." They found it impossible to convey to the Ras the exact nature of this new advancement of the Ethiopian cause. He was very hazy in his exact understanding of the role and importance of the League of Nations, or the power and influence of the international press. After the first few pints of tej he had made sure in his own mind that in some miraculous fashion the great Queen of England had espoused their cause, and that the armies of Great Britain would soon join him in the field.
Both Gregorius and Sara spoke to him at great length, trying to explain his error, and he nodded and grinned benevolently at them but remained completely unshaken in his conviction, and ended by embracing Gareth Swales, making a long rambling speech in Amharic, hailing him as an Englishman and a comrade in arms. Then, before the speech ended, the Ras fell suddenly and dramatically asleep in mid-sentence, falling face forward into a large bowl of mutton wat. The day's battle, the excitement of learning of his new and powerful ally, and the large quantities of tej were too much for him, and four of his bodyguard lifted him from the bowl and carried him snoring loudly to his household tent.
"Do not worry," Sara told his guests. "My grandfather will not be gone for long after a small rest he will return."
"Tell him not to put himself out," murmured Gareth Swales. "I for one have seen about enough of him for one day." The glow of the bonfires turned the sky ruddy and paled the moon that sailed above the mountain peaks. It shone on the steel and polished wood of the huge pile of captured weapons, rifles and pistols and ammunition bandoliers, that were heaped triumphantly in the open space before the royal party.
The sparks from the fires rose straight upwards into the still night and the laughter and voices of the guests became more unrestrained as the tej gourds circulated.
Farther along the valley, also within the acacia grove, the Gallas of Ras Kullah were celebrating the victory also, and there was the occasional faint outburst of drunken shouts and a fusillade of shots from captured Italian rifles.
Vicky sat between Gareth and Jake. She had not arranged it so, and if given the choice would have sat alone with Jake, but Gareth Swales had not been as easily discouraged as she had believed he might.
Sara came from her place beside Gregorius. Crossing the squatting circle of feasting guests, she knelt on the pile of leather cushions beside Vicky, pushing herself in between Gareth and the girl and she leaned close to Vicky, an arm around her shoulder and her lips touching her ear.
"You should have told me," she accused her sadly. "I did not know that you had decided on Jake first. I would have advised you-" At that instant a sound carried from the camp of the tance and Gallas to where they sat. It was muted by ths almost obscured by the closer hubbub of the feasting Harari filling yet the terrible heart-stopping quality of it pierced Vicky so that she gasped and clutched Sara's wrist.
Beside her Jake and Gareth had stiffened and were listening also, their heads turned to catch the sound that rose and died in a long-drawn-out rending sob.
"You have not handled them correctly, Miss Camberwell." Sara went on speaking as if she had heard nothing.
"Sara, what is it what was that?" Vicky shook her arm urgently.
"Ah!" Sara made a gesture of disdain and contempt. "That fat pervert Ras Kullah has come down from his hiding-place.
the victory, he has come to enjoy Now that we have won the booty.
He arrived an hour ago with his fat milch cows and now he feasts and entertains himself." The sound came again. It was inhuman, a terrible high pitched screech that tore across Vicky's nerves. It rose higher and higher, until Vicky wanted to cover her ears with both hands. At the instant that it seemed her nerves must snap, the sound was cut off abruptly.