Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/145

tall, rakish fur cap, had come out of the mosque of Hajji the Sweetmeat-Seller, had whispered a rapid word to him, and had walked on by his side, towards the coffee-house of Malakian, where they had sat down.

He remembered his own brazen words.

Yes. Brazen.

For, careful man, he had taken with him that day Musa Lahada, the lean, sardonic Turkish Jew who was attached as dragoman to the British Consulate and thus protected by the Union Jack.

"I saw and heard the whole thing, Mohammed Yar," he had said. "I was passing through Nahassim Street, and I heard the quarrel, the insults. I saw the blow—"

"He insulted me first!" the Kurd had cried. "That cursed Frankish infidel! He struck the first blow!"

"True; but you drew steel and killed. I saw it. I know where you hid the corpse—back of the camel stables in Farid Khan's Gully. And I have witnesses."

"Armenian witnesses! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs! Liars—"

"Armenians? Yes! Fathers of pigs, and sons of pigs? Perhaps! But not liars, Mohammed Yar. They saw the thing which is true, and they will swear to it. And Armenians or not, pigs or not, they will be believed by the British consul. For the man whom you killed was an Englishman, and—"

"And?" Mohammed Yar had asked with a sidelong glance.

"Death is bitter bitter as the fruit which grows near the Bahretlut!"

"But—must there be death?"