Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/100

"You—and your tribesmen! A dozen against one!"

"I could have killed him with my bare hands. I, alone! I was stronger than he!"

"But to-day you are old—and I am young. Your body is withered, while my body is bossed with muscles as the night sky is with stars," Ebrahim Asif said in a gentle voice, while his fingers toyed with the crimson cord of his sword, an action the significance of which was not lost on the older man.

And so he smiled.

"It is thus," he asked, "your wish to marry my daughter?"

"Yes."

"But—there is the ancient enmity between Red Village and White—"

"Over a potful of stinking khirli fish. I know." Ebrahim Asif waved a great, hairy hand. "But there will be no more babbling and jabbering and foolish quarreling after I have married your daughter. I am my late father's only son, and she—" negligently, with his thumb on which shone a star sapphire set in crude silver, he pointed at the curtain where she stood—"she is your only child. Let peace be the dowry of our wedding, peace between your village and mine, a forgetting of ancient hatreds, a splitting of future profits. Let us put aside the old enmities as a clean man puts aside soiled linen. In the future we shall divide the khirli catch evenly between your people and mine."

Yar Zaddiq laughed in his throat.

"Ahee!" he cried. "It is I who gives all the dowry. And what will you give, young Chief?"

"I?" Ebrahim Asif raised an eyebrow. "Where hate has died, no room is needed to wield a sword. Where strength goes to the making of pea:e, no violence