Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/37

He had heard about the hadji a few days earlier.

The blind mullah who ministered to the scant spiritual wants of the Raven's Station had brought word of the stranger: the Kabuli merchant who, after his wife's death, had bidden farewell to the mosques and bazaars of the city and had come to live in the hills—"to forget," as he had told the sneering mullah, "to live mated to the clean simplicity of the hills, to bring up my little son away from the noisy toil of the market places, away from the smoke and strife of the city streets, here in the hills where there is nobody but God."

"God—and the Red Chief!" the mullah had croaked through his broken, blackened teeth; and then the hadji had spoken of the faith that was his.

He had spoken of Allah, the God of Peace.

"A new Allah—by Allah!" the mullah had laughed as he repeated it to the Red Chief.

Suddenly his laughter had keyed up to a high, senile scream. For he was a man of stout orthodoxy, to whom a freethinking Sufi was worse than Christian or Jew. "A new Allah! A soft Allah! A sickly Allah wrapped in sweating cotton! An Allah who prates of forgiveness and other leprous innovations. And he—that foul, swine-fed Kabuli—said that he wanted his blood to bear witness to his faith! And I"—again mirth gurgled through the mullah's fury—"I told him that all the faith in the world will not mend his bones when we stone him—as we should—for a blasphemer and a heretic!"

"God's curse on him!" Dost Ali had chimed in—and here he saw the man in the flesh, walking along easily enough for all his city-soft feet, his lean body swinging with the long, tireless pull of a mountain pony, chanting as he walked: