PAGE 9
The Penalty
by
“The Wandis have returned from a great slaughter,” Hassan said. “Their Prophet is with them, and they bring many captives. The lad wandered into the bush, and was caught by a band of spies. They tortured him, and let him go, effendi. Thus will they torture us if we go forward any longer.” He caught at the bridle of the nearest camel. “The lust of blood is upon them,” he said. “We will go back.”
“Not so,” Herne said. “If we go back we die, for the water is almost gone. We must press forward now. There will be water in the mountains.”
Hassan glanced at him sideways. He looked as if he were minded to defy the mad Englishman, but Herne’s revolver was yet in his hand, and he thought better of it. Moreover, he knew, as did Herne, that their water supply was not sufficient to take them back. So, without further discussion, they pressed on until the heat compelled them to halt.
It had seemed to Herne the previous night that he could never close his eyes again, but now as he descended from his camel, an intense drowsiness possessed him. For a while he strove against it, and managed to keep it at bay; but the sight of Hassan, curled up and calmly slumbering, soon served to bring home to him the futility of watchfulness. The Arab was obviously resigned to his particular fate, whatever that might be, and, since sleep had become a necessity to him, it seemed useless to combat it. What, after all, could vigilance do for him in that world of hostility? The odds were so strongly against him that it had become almost a fight against the inevitable. And he was too tired to keep it up. With a sigh, he suffered his limbs to relax and lay as one dead.
IV
HE awoke hours after with an inarticulate feeling that someone wanted him, and started up to the sound of a rifle shot that pierced the stillness like a crack of thunder. In a second he would have been upon his feet, but, even as he sprang, something else that was very close at hand sprang also, and hurled him backwards. He found himself fighting desperately in the grip of an immense savage, fighting at a hopeless disadvantage, with the man’s knees crushing the breath out of his body, and the man’s hands locked upon his throat.
He struggled fiercely for bare life, but he was powerless to loosen that awful, merciless pressure. The barbaric face that glared into his own wore a devilish grin, inexpressibly malignant. It danced before his starting eyes like some hideous spectre seen in delirium, intermittent, terrible, with blinding flashes of light breaking between. He felt as if his head were bursting. The agony of suffocation possessed him to the exclusion of all else. There came a sudden glaze in his brain that was like the shattering of every faculty, and then, in a blood-red mist, his understanding passed.
It seemed to him when the light reeled back again that he had been unconscious for a very long time. He awoke to excruciating pain, of which he seemed to have been vaguely aware throughout, and found himself bound hand and foot and slung across the back of a camel. He dangled helplessly face downwards, racked by cramp and a fiery torment of thirst more intolerable than anything he had ever known.
Darkness had fallen, but he caught the gleam of torches, and he knew that he was surrounded by a considerable body of men. The ground they travelled was stony and ascended somewhat steeply. Herne swung about like a bale of goods, torn by his bonds, flung this way and that, and utterly unable to protect himself in any way, or to ease his position.
He set his teeth to endure the torture, but it was so intense that he presently fainted again, and only recovered consciousness when the agonizing progress ceased. He opened his eyes, to find the camel that had borne him kneeling, and he himself being bundled by two brawny savages on to the ground. He fell like a log, and so was left. But, bound though he was, the relief of lying motionless was such that he presently recovered so far as to be able to look about him.