Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/36

Dost Ali was a short, wide-shouldered man, with gray, ironic eyes, high cheek bones, his beard dyed red with henna juice. Like his ancestors, he had always greatly distinguished himself—that's just how he would have considered it—by the cheerful and methodical ferocity of his fighting. He was a man who paid his enemies with the crackle of steel and slaughtered cattle and the red flames licking over hut and byre; a man who had scarred the valley for a week's journey with torch and cord, and whose greatest trust—greater than the fierce desert Prophet by whose name he gave oath—was the Khyber sword, curved like the croup of a stallion.

"I judge by the word of the hand and not by the word of the mouth," he put it in his own epic manner; and so he sat there on his mountain top and watched his breed increase, though they were daughters all but one. For his youngest child was a boy, Akbar Khan, seven years old, short and broad, with a tinge of red in his thick, curly hair—and Dost Ali loved him.

"Thou art a flower in the turban of my soul," he would say, picking up the lad and pressing him to his massive, fur-clad breast, "and my heart is a tasseled floorcloth for thy feet. Ho, thou, my hero!" And then father and son would run through the gray old rooms of the castle, playing like children, frightening the women over their cook pots, screaming and yelling and laughing.

Dost Ali was easily moved to laughter—laughter cold as the hill winds—and he laughed loud and long when early one day, with the valley still waist-high in the clammy morning mist, he saw hadji Rahmet wander down the slopes, driving a herd of sheep with a crooked staff, and followed by his little son.