"Welcome, friends!" said the Turkoman, pacing the chamber restlessly. "I have heard a tale! Three days' ride to the southwest are the villages of Ahmed Shah, in the valley of Khuruk. Four days ago his men came upon a man dying in the mountains. He wore the garments of an Afghan, but in his delirium he revealed himself as an Englishman. When he was dead they searched him for loot and found certain papers which none of the dogs could read.
"But in his ravings he spoke of having been to Bokhara. It is in my mind that this Feringi was an English spy, returning to India with papers valuable to the sirkar. Perhaps the British would pay well for these papers, if they knew of them. It is my wish to possess them. Yet I dare not ride forth myself, nor send many men. Suppose the treasure was found in my absence? My own men would bar the gates against me."
"This is a matter for diplomacy rather than force," put in Suleiman Pasha smoothly. "Ali el Ghazi is crafty as well as bold. Send him with fifty men."
"Can thou do it, brother?" demanded Orkhan eagerly.
Suleiman's gaze burned into O'Donnell's soul. There was but one answer, if he wished to escape flaying steel and searing fire.
"Only in Allah is power," he muttered. "Yet I can attempt the thing."
"Mashallah!" exclaimed Orkhan. "Be ready to start within the hour. There is a Khurukzai in the suk, one Dost Shah, who is of Ahmed's clan, and will guide you. There is friendship between me and the men of Khuruk. Approach Ahmed Shah in peace and offer him gold for the papers, but not too much, lest his cupidity be roused. But I leave it to your own judgment. With fifty men there is no fear of the smaller clans between Shahrazar and Khuruk. I go now to choose the men to ride with you."
As soon as Orkhan left the chamber, Suleiman bent close to O'Donnell and whispered: "Secure the papers, but do not bring them to Orkhan! Pretend that you have lost them in the hills—anything—but bring them to me."
"Orkhan will be angry and suspicious," objected O'Donnell.
"Not half as angry as he would be if he knew what became of the Khuwarezm treasure," retorted Suleiman. "Your only chance is to obey me. If your men return without you, saying you have fled away, be sure a hundred men will quickly be upon your trail—nor can you hope to win alone through these hostile, devil-haunted hills, anyway. Do not dare to return without the papers, if you do not wish to be denounced to Orkhan. Your life depends on your playing my game, Kurd!"
CHAPTER II
Table of Contents
PLAYING SULEIMAN'S "GAME" seemed to be the only thing to do, even three days later as O'Donnell, in his guise of the Kurdish swashbuckler, Ali el Ghazi, was riding along a trail that followed a ledgelike fold of rock ribbing a mile-wide cliff.
Just ahead of him on a bony crow-bait rode the Khurukzai guide, a hairy savage with a dirty white turban, and behind him strung out in single file fifty of Orkhan Bahadur's picked warriors. O'Donnell felt the pride of a good leader of fighting men as he glanced back at them. These were no stunted peasants, but tall, sinewy men with the pride and temper of hawks; nomads and sons of nomads, born to the saddle. They rode horses that were distinctive in that land of horsemen, and their rifles were modern repeaters.
"Listen!" It was the Khurukzai who halted suddenly, lifting a hand in warning.
O'Donnell leaned forward, rising in the wide silver stirrups, turning his head slightly sidewise. A gust of wind whipped along the ledge, bearing with it the echoes of a series of sputtering reports.
The men behind O'Donnell heard it, too, and there was a creaking of saddles as they instinctively unslung rifles and hitched yataghan hilts forward.
"Rifles!" exclaimed Dost Shah. "Men are fighting in the hills."
"How far are we from Khuruk?" asked O'Donnell.
"An hour's ride," answered the Khurukzai, glancing at the mid-afternoon sun. "Beyond the corner of the cliff we can see the Pass of Akbar, which is the boundary of Ahmed Shah's territory. Khuruk is some miles beyond."
"Push on, then," said O'Donnell.
They moved on around the crag which jutted out like the prow of a ship, shutting off all view to the south. The path narrowed and sloped there, so the men dismounted and edged their way, leading the animals which grew half frantic with fear.
Ahead of them the trail broadened and sloped up to a fan-shaped plateau, flanked by rugged ridges. This plateau narrowed to a pass in a solid wall of rock hundreds of feet high; the pass was a triangular gash, and a stone tower in its mouth commanded the approach. There were men in the tower, and they were firing at other men who lay out on the plateau in a wide ragged crescent, concealed behind boulders and rocky ledges. But these were not all firing at the tower, as it presently became apparent.
Off to the left of the pass, skirting the foot of the cliffs, a ravine meandered. Men were hiding in this ravine, and O'Donnell quickly saw that they were trapped there. The men out on the plateau had cast a cordon around it and were working their way closer, shooting as they came. The men in the ravine fired back, and a few corpses were strewn among the rocks. But from the sound of the firing, there were only a few men in the gully, and the men in the tower could not come to their aid. It would have been suicide to try to cross that bullet-swept open space between the ravine and the pass mouth.
O'Donnell had halted his men at an angle of the cliff where the trail wound up toward the plateau, and had advanced with the Khurukzai guide part way up the incline.
"What does this mean?" he asked.
Dost Shah shook his head like one puzzled. "That is the Pass of Akbar," he said. "That tower is Ahmed Shah's. Sometimes the tribes come to fight us, and we shoot them from the tower. It can only be Ahmed's riflemen in the tower and in the ravine. But—"
He shook his head again, and having tied his horse to a straggling tamarisk, he went up the slope, craning his neck and hugging his rifle, while he muttered in his beard as if in uncertainty.
O'Donnell followed him to the crest where the trail bent over the rim of the plateau, but with more caution than the Khurukzai was showing. They were now within rifle range of the combatants, and bullets were whistling like hornets across the plateau.
O'Donnell could plainly make out the forms of the besiegers lying among the rocks that littered the narrow plain. Evidently they had not noticed him and the guide, and he did not believe they saw his men where he had stationed them in the shade of an overhanging crag. All their attention was fixed on the ravine, and they yelled with fierce exultation as a turban thrust above its rim fell back splashed with crimson. The men in the tower yelled with helpless fury.
"Keep your head down, you fool!" O'Donnell swore at Dost Shah, who was carelessly craning his long neck above a cluster of rocks.
"The men in the tower must be Ahmed's men," muttered Dost Shah uneasily. "Yes; it could not be otherwise, yet—Allah!" The last was an explosive yelp, and he sprang up like a madman, as if forgetting all caution in some other overwhelming emotion.
O'Donnell cursed and grabbed at him to pull him down, but he stood brandishing his rifle, his tattered garments whipping in the wind like a demon of the hills.
"What devil's work is this?" he yelled. "That is not—those are not—"
His voice changed to a gasp as a bullet drilled him through the temple. He tumbled back to the ground and lay without motion.
"Now what was he going to say?" muttered O'Donnell, peering out over the rocks. "Was that a stray slug, or did somebody see him?"
He could not tell whether the shot came from the boulders or the tower. It was typical of hill warfare, the yells and shooting keeping up an incessant devil's din. One thing was certain: the cordon was gradually closing about the men trapped in the ravine. They were well hidden from the bullets, but the attackers were working so close that presently they could finish the job with a short swift rush and knife work at close quarters.