Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/50

That night Hadji Rahmet turned thief. He stole a tiny trotting bullock belonging to Ram Chander Dass, the Hindu who picked up a scant living by lending badly chipped silver rupees to the hillmen and, as the mullah said, by praying every night for the swag-bellied and bestial god of the Hindus, which same god is the guardian angel of Compound Interest.

He stole the bullock. For he had decided to kill the Red Chief's son, and he knew that, while sharp eyes would detect a stranger wandering up the slopes to the Raven's Station, none would bother about a bullock—in a land where bullocks mean money and food and clothes—nor would sharp eyes, looking from above, see a man clinging to the bullock's shaggy belly, his hands buried in the thick pelt of the wabbly hump.

His long, lean body tortured into a grotesque angle and now and then bumping against the sharp stones of the rock path, the hadji hung on precariously while the bullock lashed out right and left, lowering its head, snorting, bellowing, stamping, whisking its tufted tail, dancing about as if stung by a bramra beetle in its efforts to shake off the strange burden that clung to its nether side; at last settling into a resigned, bovine trot and reaching the horses paddock which stretched beyond the Red Chief's sheep corral just after daybreak.

Already, down in the valley, the night mists were twisting into baroque spirals, tearing into gauzelike arabesques that burned like the plumage of a gigantic peacock in every mysterious blend of green and purple and blue.

Once in the paddock, the hadji dropped to the ground while the bullock trotted away to join its mates that were dipping their ungainly noses into a stone bin half buried beneath the crimson, feathery foliage of a squat