Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 2 (1925-08).djvu/32

"Then you may buy your freedom, or she may buy hers," he said, still hopeful of diversion. "And the one who fails to pay the greater price shall test out some of the things that are in this book."

He indicated the fatter of the two books, from which the babu had been reading.

"It is vairy instructive, sar," said the babu, lapsing into English in his excitement. "This feeding a man powdered diamond, sar. He lingers for months, with many peculiar pains, sar. I—I was jeweler's clerk in Bombay, sar, an' I could fix—"

He began to rustle in the pages of the book and read excitedly, while the raja listened drowzily. The rack was there described in detail, and the torment of thumbscrews, and of the boot, and the other devices with which the Inquisition had operated upon men's religious convictions.

He read on and on, his translations growing more and more enthusiastic as he described the tortures that had been devised by holy men. He was especially pleased by the device of clipping off the eyelids and staking a man out in the sun.

But the raja merely drowzed, until presently he said suddenly:

"Let them name the prices they will pay for mercy."

And then there was silence for a long time, while the white man's soul writhed. On the one hand, the prospect of staring with lidless scorched eyes up at a pitiless tropic sun for days or weeks or months, with other tortures yet to follow, the rack, and the boot, and flame, and water dripping until death came. And on the other hand, the giving up of his rubies, his priceless, precious rubies that glittered with a red fire that was neither of land nor sea.

He gave an agonized cry at the thought, but terror drove him, and he offered rubies for his life. The largest was the size of a man's fist and those next in size as large as a man's thumb, and so on down to tiny glittering stones no bigger than a grain of sand. He offered them all, despairingly, for his life.

And the raja looked sleepily at the woman.

"And what is your price that you will pay for life?"

And she said just two words, which the white man did not hear.

Then the raja smiled very curiously, and bade his servants go and dig up the rubies that the white man had described, and as he saw them go, all the anguish and bitterness in the white man's heart turned to venom against the woman whom he had coveted to this loss, and he made a bargain with the raja that if the rubies were as he said, that he should be able to ask one demand.

And he lay bound in the sunlight, full of an unspeakable anguish at the loss of his rubies, until the men came back with his treasure.

The raja looked at them sleepily, and allowed the babu to touch and finger them. He made no move to examine them himself. But the white man, seeing all his wealth passing forever from his hands cried out horribly.

"My demand! I make my demand!"

And the raja gazed at him, drowzily.

"The life of that woman! Kill her with torments!"

The white man sank back upon the stone flooring and moaned with anguish at the red stones going from him forever.

And then the babu looked up and smiled very placidly and said, "These are the rubies of the raja of Kosar, sar. I took them to him from Bombay, sar, when I was jeweler's clerk. He was very poor an' could make no display, so he had these jewels made