Colt was enchanted.
Raisuli cast a glance at the sky. "Bedding down," he snapped. "Excuse me—c'est l'heure."
He left Colt with the Poles, mounting his pony again to gallop down the line barking orders to the various Hindus, Tajiks, Chinese, Abyssinians, Kirghiz and Kroomen who made up the crew. It took no more than a quarter hour to bring the unwieldy line to a halt; in another quarter hour a thousand felt tents were pitched and pegged, fires lighted and animals staked out.
"He times well, that one," smiled M. Lodz. Colt looked up and saw the sky already deepening into black. He shuddered a little and drew nearer to the fire.
"I think," said McNaughton absently, "that I could take a little refreshment." Lodz looked up from under his brows, then clapped his hands. A native boy came running. "Bring food—some of that cold joint, wallah."
"Yes, sahib."
"Such a night this will be, perhaps," said M. Lodz softly, "as it was in August."
"Just such a night," said McNaughton. "Will you join us, Mr. Colt?"
"Not I," said the American with a sense of guilt. "I was fed when I came to after fainting. Is it safe—may I look about?"
He got no answer. The boy had returned with a great haunch of meat; silently the Occidentals gathered about it, taking out knives. Colt watched in amazement as the dainty Frenchwoman hacked out a great slab of beef and tore at it, crammed it down her throat. Before it was swallowed she was cutting away again.
"Ah—I asked if I ought to look about…."
Lodz shot him a sidewise glance, his mouth crammed with meat, his jaws working busily. Then, as though Colt had never spoken, he returned to the serious business of feeding, with the same animal quality as his wife and McNaughton showed.
"I'll look about then," said Colt forlornly. He wandered away from the fire in the direction of a yellow felt tent. There he was delighted to catch words of Cantonese.
"Greetings, son of Han," he said to the venerable speaker.
The fine old Mongol head turned; Colt felt himself subjected to a piercing, kindly scrutiny by two twinkling little black eyes. The ruddy little mouth smiled. "Sit down, son. It's a long time between new friends."
Colt squatted by the fire obediently; the venerable one took a long pull from a bottle of suntori, a vile synthetic Japanese whisky. Wiping his mouth with the back of a wrinkled, yellow hand, he announced, "I'm Grandfather T'ang. This is my son, rang Gaw Yat. If you let him he'll talk you deaf about the time he was on the long march with the Eighth Route Army. He claims General Chuh Teh once ate rice with him."
T'ang Gaw Yat smiled obediently and a little tolerantly at his father's whimsy. He was a fine-looking Chinese, big-headed and straight-faced, with little wrinkles of laughter playing about his mouth. "What my father says," he confided, "is strictly true. It was a full thousand miles from—"
"What did I tell you?" broke in the old man. "The slave is his wife, and the smartest one of the lot." He indicated a small Chinese woman of the indeterminate age between twenty and fifty.
She said in English hardly accented, "Hello. You do speak English, don't you? These barbarians don't know anything but their village jargon and Canton talk." The smile took the edge from her harsh words.
Colt introduced himself, and answered endless questions on the state of China, military, political and economic.
"Hold off," ordered the woman at last. "Let him have his turn. Want to know anything, Mr. Colt?"
"Wouldn't mind knowing how long you've been traveling."
"Stupid question," broke in Grandfather Han. "Just what one expects from a foreign devil. The splendor of the night closes about him and he would know how long we've been on the march! Have a drink—a small one." He passed the bottle; Colt politely refused.
"Then maybe you'd like a little game—" There clicked in his palm two ivory cubes.
"Please, Father," said T'ang Gaw Yat. "Put those away."
"Pattern of ancient virtue!" sneered the old man. "O you child of purity!"
"Grandfather is very lucky," said the woman quietly. "He started on the caravan with nothing but those dice and many years of gambling experience. He is now one of the richest men on the line of march. He owns two herds of sheep, a riding camel of his own and the best food there is to be had."
"And drink," said the son somberly.
"Tell you what," said the old man. "You can have some of my V.S.O.
stock—stuff I won from a Spaniard a month back." He rummaged for a moment in one of the tent pockets, finally emerged with a slender bottle which caught the firelight like auriferous quartz. "Danziger Goldwasser—le veritable," he gloated. "But I can't drink the stuff.
Doesn't bite like this Nipponese hellbroth." He upended the bottle of suntori again; passed the brandy to Colt.
The American took it, studied it curiously against the fire. It was a thin, amber liquid, at whose bottom settled little flakes. He shook them up into the neck of the bottle; it was like one of the little globular paperweights that hold a mimic snowstorm. But instead of snow there were bits of purest beaten gold to tickle the palate and fancy of the drinker.
"Thanks," he said inadequately. "Very kind of you."
"Curious, isn't it," said the woman, "how much the caravan life resembles a village? Though the wealth, of course, is not in land but in mercantile prospects—" She stopped as Colt caught her eye. Why, he wondered, had she been rattling on like that?
"The wisdom of the slave is the folly of the master," said Grandfather T'ang amiably. "He is happy who learns to discount the words of a woman."
"Suppose," said the woman slowly and quietly, "you learn to mind your own business, you poisonous old serpent?"
"They can't stand common sense," confided the old man.
Colt felt, painfully, that he had wandered into a family quarrel. He bolted with a mumbled excuse, hanging onto the bottle of brandy. He stood for a moment away from the trail and stared down the long line of fires. There were more than a thousand, snaking nearly out of sight. The spectacle was restful; the fires were a little blue, being kindled largely out of night-soil briquettes.
The sky was quite black; something had overcast the deep-ranked stars of the plateau. No moon shone.
Colt settled against the lee of a rock in a trance. He heard winds and the hiss of voices, soft in the distance. It was the quiet and complaining Tajiki dialect. He could hear it and understand it. It was absurdly simple, he thought abstractedly, to pick out the meanings of words and phrases.
"Such a night," one was saying, "as in August. You remember?"
"I remember." Then, dark and passionate, "The limping, bloody demon!
Let him come near and I'll tear his vitals!"
"Surely you will not. He is the tearer in his evil work. We are the torn—"
Colt sat up with a start. What the hell! He couldn't understand Tajiki, not one little word of it! He had been dreaming, he thought. But it didn't melt away as a dream should. The memory of the overheard conversation was as sharp and distinct as it could be, something concrete and mysterious, like a joke that hadn't been explained to him.
Then there was a sort of heavenly grumbling, like a megatherial word or more. Colt twisted and stared at the zenith; could see nothing at all. The rumbling ended. Colt saw black little fingers all down the line rise and attend, twisting and staring and buzzing to each other.
2
He hurried to the fire of his European friends. They were sprawled on blankets, their bodies a little swollen from the enormous meal they had eaten. Colt saw the bare bone of the joint, scraped by knife edges. The Occidentals were unconcernedly smoking.