Page:Alien Souls by Achmed Abdullah (1922).djvu/68

it without a word and left the hut, the tip of his steel scabbard bumping smartly against the hard ground.

Such was the home-coming of Yar Khan, the son of Ali Khan; and, as he stretched himself on the earthen platform and gathered the covers about him, he was conscious of a faint flavor of disappointment. They had accepted him, those two, but there had been no joy in the accepting, no generosity, no quick, warm-hearted friendship; and they were his cousins, blood of his blood and bone of his bone—and he had longed for them so!

For their sake he had left Cairo and the smooth gold of Cairo; for their sake he had traveled the many miles, riding till his spurs were red and his hands galled with the pull of the reins and his saddle broken across the tree.

And they—Jehan Hydar and the other? Why, they had accepted him as a man accepts salt to his meat, and they had sneered—a little.

He drew himself up on his elbow and looked out of the tiny window which was set low into the wall. A stark black pine stood spectrally in the haggard, indifferent light of the young day. He shivered.

But again the impulsive magnanimity of youth came to his rescue, and he said to himself that these men were his cousins, hill-bred, their whole life a rough fact reduced to rougher order. And he? He was home, and nothing else mattered. Henceforth he, too, would be a hill-man, free and unshackled. The weaver of his own life he would be, running the woof and warp of it as he willed, away from wheedling barter, away from the crowded, fetid bazaars and the shrill trade cries of the market-place. To-morrow he would greet his clan, his family, and they