Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/42

drawn sword flickering like a cresset of all the evil passions which he loathed and which he had set out to combat.

"Peace, brother!" he said again. His voice was steady; and then, even in Dost Ali's slow-grinding mind, rose the conviction that this man—this man who suffered the most deadly insults without fight or flight—was not a coward. And his hatred grew apace. For he did not understand.

A man who fought—yes! Also, a man who feared and fled. He had met both sorts, had handled both sorts. But here was a man who neither feared nor fled. It was a new experience to the mountaineer's naïve brutality—a new experience to crush which he would have to devise new means. What means? He wondered. He jerked back his head as a racing stallion slugs above the bit.

He stood there, squat, wide-shouldered, his red beard flopping in the wind like a bat wing, looking with puckered, puzzled eyes toward the east where the farther fog banks were melting and rolling into nothingness and where a scarlet flush was shooting up in fantastic spikes—as if the east could give answer.

Should he kill—outright?

A sob of steel, a gurgle, blood caking on the ground—he knew the tale of it, oft repeated—and the fire of his hatred would be out; the heat thereof would be spent.

But to what profit?

Where was the satisfaction in killing a man who did not resist, who did not answer steel with the song of steel, flash for flash, and strength for strength? It would leave the mystery still unsolved, the riddle unread, the grape impressed. The fact that the hadji had