Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/51

The Net of
Shamlegh
by Lieutenant
Edgar Gardiner

Billy Singleton stood just inside the high gate of the Kashmir Serai and cursed—cursed as fluently and efficiently as any native, which is something that few of the ruling white race can do.

All his long trip up from the coast through the sweltering, enervating heat of the Punjab at summertime had been in vain; the time he could so ill spare and the expense account that would doubtless set the Kimball line's auditors about his ears again, all wasted—wasted because of the absence of one man. And because that man was a "black man" to boot—a native—well, that was the crowning insult.

A camel caravan creaked into the serai through the hot black night, coming almost magically under the blazing lights from out the velvety darkness. Perhaps this was he at last; perhaps Mahbub Ali, the Afghan, had but been delayed.

Apathetically he watched the ill-tempered, snapping beasts loom up out of that furnace of the night, laden with bundles and bales; almost mechanically his eyes swept the shrieking, cursing Balti camel-drivers' faces, looking for that of the Pathan horse-trader.

The caravan passed and melted into the steaming, milling crowd that filled the serai with a riot of color and a pandemonium of sound, and Singleton cursed his ill luck again.

This was the romance and the glamor of the East; this was the wonder and the mystery of the Orient, that had so thrilled him when he was first offered that odd position with the mighty Kimball steamship lines! In