Page:Weird Tales v15n01 1930-01.djvu/52
his ignorance he had thought that as their confidential agent he would enjoy a palatial suite of offices with a retinue of native clerks and servants, perhaps in Singapore, or maybe Calcutta. Instead, he had been rushed hither and yon, now to see an obscure Hill raja in some out-of-the-way part of India; now up some sluggish, stinking river in the F. M. S. to confer with an equally obscure princelet whose dignity was in inverse ratio to his importance; or, like the present occasion, when the man he sought was not even so important, but merely a wandering horse-trader. What possible cargo could accrue from such an one?
No wonder Billy Singleton stood just within the high gate of the Kashmir serai under the blazing lights and cursed the dilatory, careless Afghan, root and branch, with the thoroughness of the native, even unto the fifth and sixth generation. For Billy was that rarest of all men, the English-born European who thoroughly understood the native mind, who "when he was in Rome did as the Romans" with a vengeance, even thinking native. Some there are who will tell you that there is no such animal; they will shout that even the country-born European, brought up by native servants, playing with native children, can not do that. But Billy could and did.
A great and absorbing game, this, matching wits with the white men from competing steamship lines, matching them with the infinite varied traits and habits of yellow, brown and black, and winning, too, far more often than he lost.
Billy never knew the esteem in which he was held by his employers; he never knew the regard in which the natives held him—those who were his friends, and they were legion; but he did know the hatred engendered in his enemies. For he made these last, even as any other who does things, whether in the Orient or the Occident. It is only the man who does nothing who makes no enemies in this world, and sometimes I am not so sure about even that.
Romance, mystery—bah! Dirt and delay, double-dealing and derision—that was the Orient, he thought, as he turned away for his hotel in the European quarter of Lahore.
He turned his back on the swarming, colorful hive that was the Kashmir Serai as evening passed into night, and threaded his way through the crowds of the narrow streets that reminded him of nothing so much as a heap of working maggots on a dunghill; he pushed his way absent-mindedly through the hot, crowded Motee Bazar where every race in the Asiatic world rubbed elbows—screaming, cursing, chaffing, dickering; past the Lahore Museum, the "Agaib-Gher" of the natives—the "wonder-house"; past the brick platform opposite where stood the great gun "Zam Zammeh," the "fire-breathing dragon." Tradition has it that whoso holds that holds the Punjab, and the great obsolete green-bronze piece of ordnance has ever been the coveted bit of the conqueror's loot.
It was too hot to hurry; besides, why hurry in this land where even Time stands still? Billy passed from the crowded, garish way into a narrow, tortuous alley that made more directly for his ultimate destination than the better-lighted, thronging thoroughfares. A foolhardy thing for any white man to do, especially when he is alone; but Billy was never one to think of risks. He came and went as he pleased, took appalling risks with the utmost sang-froid, and turned up debonair and smiling at the end. Billy passed into the narrow, tortuous alley and met his Kismet.
Half-way down that dark way his inattentive ears heard the thud of blows on flesh, caught the whisper of a voice begging for mercy—a