Told in the East by Talbot Mundy (best fiction books to read TXT) 📖

There was no doubt of the end, then, barring accidents. Even Hassan Ah could not have doubted it; but he did his black man's uttermost to put it off, and he fought as gamely as anybody ever fought since prize-ring rules were drafted. He did not foul, or take undue advantage once.

It was a plain, right-handed, battering-ram punch to the neck that ended things, and Hassan Ah lay coughing on the sand with bulging eyes while Joe Byng tended Curley's hurts.

“Hasn't the nigger got any pals?” asked Crothers; and then it occurred to Byng that the most hurt man was surely most in need of mending. Both he and Crothers bent over him, then, and they soon had him on his feet again.

“Ah told you Ah'm English!” were the first words he succeeded in spluttering through swollen lips.

“Now, what d'you mean by that exactly?” asked Joe Byng, his attitude toward him almost entirely changed. A man who loses gamely is entitled to respect if not to friendship.

Hassan Ah searched in the tattered shirt that he had laid aside, and pulled out a folded piece of paper after a lot of fumbling. He opened it gingerly, and holding one corner of it displayed the rest with evident intention not to allow it out of his grasp.

“That says Ah'm English!” he explained.

“Oh!” said Crothers, rubbing an injured eye in order to see it better. “Can you read, you black heathen?”

“No,” said the pilot. “That says Ah'm English, but Ah can't read!”

“Well, MacHassan,” said Curley Crothers, reading the document a second time. “Black or white, you fight like a gentleman. I'm proud to have licked you. Good-by, and good luck! Here's my hand!”

They shook hands, and the seamen started shoreward with the terrier in tow.

“Did you read the paper?” asked Crothers. “It was dated Aden—non-coms' mess of some regiment or other. 'This is to certify that this regiment taught Hassan Ah to use his fists, and that he has since licked every single mother's son of us!' Pity I didn't see that first, eh?”

“Oh, I dunno,” said Joe Byng, who had not had to do the fighting. “You licked the savage, anyway.”

Hassan Ah was right. There was no more shore leave granted. Crothers and Joe Byng were punished with extra duty and “confined to ship” for coming back with the marks of fighting on them; and the Puncher gave no further signs of life until, some three I days later, her long-suffering engines turned again and she departed through the channel that had brought her in.

Then the sheik and three others and a certain Hassan Ah went down at midnight to the jail and lifted with the aid of long poles passed through the rings in them the largest floor stones of that vermin-infested building. But the vermin did not trouble them. What they were after and what they lifted out was the cases of guns and cartridges the Puncher had contrived to miss.

THE END