Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/59

Yar Khan had lived the haphazard life of Eastern childhood, with no lessons but those of the crowded, crooked streets and an occasional word of prosy Koranic wisdom from some graybeard among his father's customers. When he had reached his fifteenth year, manhood had come—sudden and a little cruel as it comes to Asians. On that day, his father had taken him into the shop, and, with a great gesture of his lean arms, had pointed at the dusty confusion of his stock-in-trade; at the mattings full of yellow Persian tobacco, the pipe bowls of red clay, the palm-leaf bags containing coffee and coarse brown sugar, the flat green boxes filled with arsenic and rhubarb and antimony and tafl and sal-ammoniac.

"He of great head becomes a chief, and he of great feet a shepherd," Ali Khan had said, ridiculing Fate after the manner of the hill-bred. "Thou art blood of my blood. From this day on, thou wilt be a trader, and thou wilt prosper. Gold will come to thy hands—unasked, like a courtezan."

Ali Khan had been right. Together, father and son had prospered. They had heaped gold on clinking gold, and of gold, too, had been the father's endless talk, praising the cold metal at yawning length, dwelling, as it were, on the outer husk of things; and when Yar Khan's softer mind rebelled at the hard philosophy Ali Khan would laugh and say: "Thou art right, little son. Gold is the breath of a thief. Gold is a djinn. Gold is an infidel sect. But—" with a shrewd wink—"give gold to a mangy dog—and the people will call him Sir Dog. For gold is strength!"

It was only in the evenings, when they had put up the heavy wooden shutters of their shop and were returning to their tiny whitewashed living-house in the