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Show had won Sir Claude's enthusiastic admiration. Tall, lithe, one- eyed, with long, yellow teeth shaded by a thin, wiry, black mustache, he was not beautiful to look upon. But he knew his business and took a pleasure in it. He had been eager for these sporting expeditions. Perhaps he had been too eager. The landlady of the auberge had an influence. She had infected Sir Claude with her own distrust of these desert men. Of his wife he was thinking now, with the anxious, protective sentiment of the strong, loving man; of himself with an angry bitterness. How could he have left her alone, without even her maid, in an inn lost in the wilderness, while he gratifying his selfish lust for ? The loneliness of the desert him, the darkness, the keen against his brown cheeks roused in him a sort of fury against himself. The casey little hostelry in the presented itself to his imagination as a cut-throat, desolate shanty. And , there, among wild, treacherous people who would slit any one's throat for a few sous, he had left the whimsical, ' :i.JJ fair-haired little creature he adored alone to face the night. - · He hurried on. And again he thought of Achmed and of the Spahi, connecting them together in his mind. Achmed had been very eager him to stay at El-Akbara, had urged him repeatedly to remain for a time, had painted in glowing colors ' .I the wonders of the region, and had film\ I spoken of Beni-Mora as a place for !1V'il invalids and old women, intolerable to men. He had read at a· glance, Arab fashion, the character of Sir Claude, and had played upon it with a subtle cunning. Had he not? But all this might have been merely in order that the guide might pocket Sir 93 |
