VENGEANCE IN SAMARRA

Originally published in Short Stories, June 10, 1940.

CHAPTER 1.

As the raft floated downstream, there was nothing for Deever to do but sit and smell the cargo of baled wool and rawhides and apricot paste from inner Kurdistan. Nothing to do but watch the rocky bank, the two sleeping raftsmen, and the two who steered with their long sweeps. Nothing to do but nurse a rifle and think.

Thinking. That was what made Jake Deever’s long face lengthen a little more. Twelve years now, and he could not go back; some witnesses were still alive. He was homesick from thinking of corn whiskey, the smell of baking corn bread, the fumes of frying ham. But if he had a chance to do it over again, he’d fire that shot without hesitating. A man’s duty.

There was neither port nor starboard on a raft; no way of designating Ayyub and Ilderim, who manned the sweeps. It turned slowly round and round, so that Deever and his crew were evenly toasted by the sun. But it wasn’t a bad life, living in the mountains, and freighting goods to Bagdad.

Ayyub shouted and gestured toward the dust cloud that filled a granite floored pass, high up and some distance ahead. A caravan was filing down the trail toward the broad shelf which skirted the Little Zab.

The two sleeping raftsmen sat up, and blinked in the shade of their scanty awning. Deever said, “Wet those hides before they bust!”

Still groggy, the two obeyed. They took long-handled dippers and ladled water over as many of the two hundred inflated goatskins as were exposed to the sun. The cargo was not heavy enough to submerge more than a fraction of the blown up hides, much less the poplar trunks and planks that held them into place.

“An old man is riding with Jawan Khan,” Ilderim said, squinting through the mirage that danced between the bank and the barren hillside. “A man with a white beard.”

“Jawan Khan’s uncle,” one of the men with the dippers cut in, for the raft had turned enough to spoil Ilderim’s view.

Deever frowned a little. He wondered why feeble Tahir Beg had come down from the mountains. No one knew how old he was. Tahir Beg hated infidels.

For several years he had preached against Deever, recommending a blood feud with whatever tribesmen harbored an infidel who dressed like a Turk.

Deever, however, had not changed his way of dress. Instead of the high, conical cap and bulky turban, the baggy pantaloons, and shoes with upturned toes, Deever wore a hat, a Norfolk jacket, trousers that did not match, and a pair of brogans. He had a collar and a necktie, the final abomination in native eyes; all purchased in Bagdad. He would be damned before he would put on the outlandish dress of Kurdistan. This came somewhat from stubbornness aroused by Tahir Beg’s antagonism, and somewhat from that same decent conservatism which had compelled him to shoot a neighbor, back in Pine Ford, North Carolina.

The slow bong-bong-bong of camel bells became louder. Dust choked men who thumped donkeys on the rump and cursed the grandfathers of the animals. Tall horsemen all agleam with silver dagger sheaths and crossed bandoliers of cartridges rode slim-legged Turki horses, guarding the caravan from enemy tribesmen.

Already, Deever recognized Jawan Khan; not his face, at that distance, but his figure and his way of sitting a horse. The khan was a shade under six feet—about Deever’s height, and definitely runty for a Kurd—but he had magnificent straw-colored mustaches that reached out past his ears, and they somewhat made up for lack of stature.

The khan drew a rifle from his saddle boot and pumped five shots into the air. This was a needless formality to indicate that he waited on the bank with an empty weapon. Deever rose, long, lanky, and magnified by the sun behind him. He emptied his Mauser. And instinctively reloaded it, just as Jawan Khan was doing, ashore.

By the time Ayyub and Ilderim maneuvered the raft past jagged rocks, outwitted whirlpools, and slowly edged her toward the bank, the caravan men had unloaded the animals. Jawan Khan was stamping the caked dust from his scarlet boots. The khan’s uncle had no energy to waste. He stood there, very thin, lean-faced, sunken-eyed; top heavy from his oversized turban, and seemingly on the point of toppling over.

There was an exchange of salutations. Then tea was served in a shadowed angle, and cigarettes. Deever felt the old man’s disapproving, deep set eyes, but beyond inquiring about Tahir Beg’s health, there was no question that could be asked. Barring the lack of Christian food and drink, the way of these mountain clans was very much as it was back home.

Finally Jawan Khan said, “My uncle is making a pilgrimage to Samarra. In this weather, riding is too difficult. But it will be easy for him, on your raft.”

Deever had not counted on a passenger; only on merchandise. There was always danger of Arab raiders, attacking when the raft was moored by night. Tahir Beg would be a heavy responsibility. Deever said, “There is a feud between me and the Arabs, just north of Tikrit. I shot some of them instead of paying for the right to pass down the Tigris.”

Tahir Beg smiled bleakly. “That is why I want to go with you. You guard whatever you carry. And I must reach Samarra before I die. A saint came to me in a dream and commanded me.”

He folded his skinny old hands. Take it or leave it.

The men were loading Jawan Khan’s goods on the raft. Ayyub went around with a tube, blowing up goatskins which had leaked. Ilderim was directing the arrangement of the bales, so that there would be a sheltered place for a cooking fire, and a clear space amidships for free play of the sweeps.

Deever did not like the responsibility. A raft might break up from being swept by a treacherous squall against the bank. Raiders might overtake it by stealth, cut its lashings, and float ashore what little they could, while the crew scrambled. Even if the old man sickened and died from the murderous heat of the Tigris flatlands, that would reflect on Deever. He remembered his own kinsmen back home.

Someone would brood over the old man’s death, and finally take a shot. And since he could not go back to North Carolina, Deever wanted to stay with these people. They were white folks. Some had yellow hair, some red. They were blue eyed or gray-eyed, and many looked like Norsemen. Though Deever had no book knowledge of the kinship between Anglo-Saxon and Kurd, he instinctively knew them for kinfolk, and knew that his wife, Asima, was as white and proper a woman as any back home.

“Uncle, how will you come back? We break up the raft and ride. You know that.”

Tahir Beg had an answer. “I am not coming back. I am hurrying to Samarra to die, and be buried in holy ground.”

This was ironic. Samarra, the filthiest, most contemptible city in Iraq. More cutthroats, more thieves, more harlots, more ruffians. Yet, a place of pilgrimage; holy, from the burial of saints, to Shi’a and Sunni Moslem alike. As Deever put it, not with any great inaccuracy, “For Catholic or Protestant Mohammedans, it don’t make any difference.”

Jawan Khan seemed to read what was behind Deever’s long, narrow face, behind his bleak gray eyes, his slowly tightened, thin mouth. He said, “After what you did to that tax collector, we know that you do not fear any Jabaur Arabs!”

They had him there. A man can be forgiven fear—Allah does not make all men equally valiant, nor equally strong—but a man has an obligation to his neighbors. Obligations of doing, as well as not doing. The shot that had made Deever an exile had been fired purely as the fulfillment of a man’s duty to punish a breach of neighborliness.

“Your uncle has many enemies. He used to be a great raider. Someone may try to kill him before he can die peacefully.”

“We cannot get him to Samarra on horse,” Jawan Khan said. “And a saint commanded him to make the pilgrimage.”

All that Deever could say was, “Then come with us, Uncle. You are right welcome.”

CHAPTER 2.

It took two more days, going down the Zab. Two days of pitiless roasting. Whatever the position of the sun, the slow turning of the raft put the passengers so that both sides were exposed to whatever cliffs reflected the glare. At intervals, tiny melon patches were green against brown hillsides. Here and there, a water wheel creaked. But there was little cultivation. The people of the foothills feared the Kurds of the mountains.

At sunset of the second day, a forbidding range of red hills blocked the view. The sun sank red through a haze of dust, and the heat surged in quivering blasts to dry Deever’s eyeballs, sting his shaded cheeks, oppress him as a choking hand and a crushing weight. Old Tahir Beg was soaking cheese in river water. It was aged for two years or more, until it was like lumps of gray rock, so that it would not spoil. Half an hour’s soaking, however, would soften the cheese and extract the salt.

Deever asked, “How is your appetite, Uncle?”

“Well, praise Allah,” the old man said. The malicious twinkle of his eyes betrayed his pleasure at seeing Deever roasted.

The Zab was joining the Tigris, a very lake of a river, broad and muddy, and skirting the Jebel Hamrin range. Tahir Beg squinted across the water, and into the desolation of the red stone hills, “Verily, from hotness we go into fire, and out of fire into hell,” he cackled. “Pray, O Man, for Allah’s mercy.”

A thoroughly unpleasant fellow, this Tahir Beg, who was going to Samarra to die. There was a promise in his words. Deever became more and more uneasy. He fingered the simmering bolt of his Mauser, and narrowly eyed the hills that harbored the Jabaur Arabs. Deever’s blond wife, Asima, had predicted disaster. She blamed it on an evil dream, and begged him not to go to Bagdad. Let Ayyub take charge. Ayyub and Ilderim did all the work anyway. Now Deever began to feel that Asima was right. He should have followed her premonition. Some vague bit of gossip might have warned her of Tahir Beg’s plans, and without quite knowing just why, she had sensed danger.

That cackling old fellow with his sour mouth and hooked nose and deep set eyes. A doddering hawk. A falcon too old to strike, yet maliciously pecking at whatever was near. Deever said to himself, “He’ll outlive us all. He’s like grandpappy, taking more than forty years to die when he was a hundred and one.”

He wished the old man long life, but he was uncomfortable. He did not like that jingling proverb, “Verily, from hotness into fire, and from fire into hell.” It had a personal dig, the way Tahir spoke it. The old man knew he was unwelcome, and he resented it.

Deever began to see how true the words were. First that shooting back home. It had done no real good; the man’s testimony, even though not yet given in court, had nonetheless sent Uncle Stinson to Atlanta, for a bit of moonshining. But putting a bullet through the treacherous neighbor had been a man’s duty; a family that let other folks push its members around might as well be dead.

Then flight, and borrowing a distant relative’s papers, taking his place on an oil tanker. It docked at Bushire, and Deever jumped ship, as by then he had to. Shooting a Federal witness was a serious matter. He could not go back, so he went up the Tigris to Bagdad.

Mountaineer’s instinct and simplicity somehow got him past Bagdad, and into Kurdistan. He knew not a word of their language, but he looked like the rawboned Kurds, he had their temper and their stubbornness.

But a chain of vengeance never stops with one link. That was what Tahir Beg’s wry speech really meant. From hotness into the fire, from fire into hell. As grandpappy had put it, “When things get just so bad, they finally change. And get worse.” An unpleasant old cuss, very much like Tahir Beg; a hellion for seventy-odd years, then he got religion and spent forty more as a saint.

Up the Tigris, a dozen years ago, to Jazira. Right where Syria and Turkey and Iraq met. A squad of Turkish soldiers came with a tax collector. One of Deever’s newly found friends lost some sheep and gained a fractured skull in the course of the collecting. So Deever went out with a borrowed rifle. He picked off the tax collector—which makes any mountaineer a hero, whether in Kurdistan or elsewhere—and six soldiers for good measure. Then Deever emigrated back into Iraq.

More than ever, he was a man of honor, but a price was on his head in two countries now. And Deever began to feel like fate’s tackling dummy. Doing the manly thing kept a fellow in hot water. If Tahir Beg was not a parcel of ill omen, nothing was. Already, the crew ceremoniously washed, gargling, sniffing, dabbling their ears with water; getting ready for prayer, even though travelers can claim exemption.

Tahir Beg’s presence was responsible for that.

And as the sun dipped behind the Jebel Hamrin, Tahir Beg droned his “intention” and so did the others, letting the raft float free; which it could, safely, at that point.

Then Deever saw the three little kuffas that shot from the dancing shadows of the western bank of the Tigris. They were tub-shaped boats, woven of the rushes that had concealed them, and caulked with the asphalt and bitumen that had for centuries vainly spoken of the presence of petroleum in Iraq. Lean, butter-smeared men with headcloths and headbands paddled out into the shadow of the Jebel Hamrin; they had rifles, and there was robbery in their hearts. They were Jabaur Arabs, and no one has found any Arab lower than these.

Deever, sitting in the shadow of a bale, saw the silent approach of the kuffas. “Damn my hide,” he always said when he looked at such a boat, “it’s like the Sunday school story about Moses in the bullrushes. Same kind of ark, all right.”

He grinned, cuddled the Mauser to his cheek. Just as Tahir Beg touched his forehead to the rug he had spread, Deever cut loose. A man jerked upright in the kuffa, toppled over the side. His companion yelled, and the boat capsized. The survivor swam under water. The two in the other kuffa opened fire. A third one pulled from shore.

The crew of the raft scrambled for guns. Tahir Beg continued praying. No Arab was going to nullify his start. In a way, he was right. Before Ayyub and the others could lay hold of a weapon, Deever’s second shot smacked over the water. That broke the raid.

When Tahir Beg finished the four-genuflection prayer he had “announced,” Deever said, “It is better not to pray when traveling.”

Tahir Beg answered, “They were slipping up on men at prayer, and Allah punished them as he saw fit.”

Except for Deever’s watchfulness, the old fanatic’s punctilious devotions would have caused a massacre and looting; the raiders had not challenged or demanded a “present” as they usually did. But Tahir Beg had justified himself with an argument that no one could refute. Ayyub and the others were impressed. Their respectful looks, not at Deever, but at Tahir Beg, indicated that it was better to trust Allah than marksmanship.

The next day, the bare red rock of Jebel Hamrin was behind the raft, while on the eastern bank, a similar bulwark rose out of the brown plain—a continuation of the range whose break made a gate for the Tigris. But ahead, as far as Deever could see, was flatness whose only trace of life or motion was the dancing of heat devils between baked earth and brazen sky.

Finally a great cliff cropped up out of that otherwise unbroken expanse of scorched brown. On its lee slope, Tikrit looked down on the broad Tigris. Tikrit, the fortress not even Hulagu Khan had captured, was now not worth sacking. A dozen tawdry shops, a few coffee houses; straight walled mud houses, rising in steps on the sloped crest of the cliff. Arab girls filed down the narrow path to the river. Their golden bracelets gleamed, their robes trailed in the dust as they glided with water jugs balanced on their heads.

Desert telegraph could easily outrace a horse, so Deever was not amazed when white smoke puffed from a parapet, high up on the cliff. Two hand cast slugs, weighing an ounce apiece, thudded into a bale of apricot paste. Another whistled overhead, and plunked into the brown water. Deever had not a chance of hitting the snipers; so he rose, fired a shot straight into the air, and turned his back to Tikrit.

Tahir Beg’s sour smile was begrudged appreciation of the contemptuous gesture. The infidel in the improper clothing did have his points.

They kept the raft in midstream that night, instead of pulling ashore to sleep. “It is cooler,” Tahir Beg said.

Deever corrected him. “No, Uncle, it is safer. Your life is on my head.”

The old man’s leathery face twitched, and would have reddened had there been enough blood in him. Deever was pleased, having finally made this irritating passenger uncomfortable, and without a violation of hospitality. It took a lot to get under Tahir Beg’s skin, and shake his complacence, his smug piety, his droning proverbs and his quotations from the Koran.

At dawn, the tall spire of Imam Daur reached high over a mud wall and the parched crowns of sickly palms. Here Nebuchadnezzar had made his golden image, someone had told Deever, and bade Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to worship or be thrown into the fiery furnace. As he came near, Deever always grinned thinly and cursed the barren plain and said to himself, “Don’t know as it took much gumption after all, Daniel telling his friends to walk into the furnace. Probably couldn’t tell the difference no-how.”

At times, miserable settlements broke the desolation. A clump of palms. A saint’s tomb, of whitewashed mud. Patches of melons. Things noticed only close at hand, for the eye had to cover too much emptiness to accommodate itself to variations. It was close to evening when a small coracle came from the second hamlet they had passed that day. Deever shouted, “Rub, ya kilab! Get desharda! Keupek ogblu!” It was doubtful that the man paddling the tub-shaped boat understood either the Turkish or the Arabic words that called him a descendant of dogs, and the son of a lewd mother, and advised him to go away quickly. Before Deever could make it clearer, Tahir Beg stayed his hand.

“He has cucumbers. Let us buy some.”

Ayyub looked up from his rice. “Cucumbers, by Allah!”

Ilderim did not speak, but his face was eloquent. Deever shrugged. One scrawny Arab, living with a starved family in a hovel near some stunted trees. Deever beckoned.

The pockmarked Arab was too servile to be convincing. Neither did he haggle as long as he should have, though he had plenty of time, having made his kuffa fast to the raft. But the cucumbers were cool, and the melons the fellow had were sweet. He made his sale, and paddled back to the bank.

Darkness came swiftly, with little twilight. Stars cropped out, large and very close; the lake-width of the Tigris made the evening cool. Deever was well fed and content. Two more days, and the old pest would be in Samarra.

Then Ayyub yelled. There was a creak, a snap, a surge of water. The deck sank beneath Deever. Tahir Beg screeched, and a blurred something threshed in the river. The raft was coming apart. Some of the carefully piled bales were separating, sinking, bobbing about in the water. Goatskins were escaping. A greasy, naked man flashed past Deever, who had scrambled toward more certain footing.

That wet contact in the gloom, and the momentary glimpse by the glow of the brazier further amidships told him the story. The kuffa had concealed one or more swimmers, river Arabs who had breathed through reeds thrust up through the woven rushes of the “tub.” During the peasant’s brief haggling, they had easily slipped to the shadows of the raft, and there waited for darkness.

“Watch out!” Deever shouted. “Arabs! Cutting the raft apart! Over there, Ayyub!”

He drew his revolver and fired at the first mark. A knife, gleamed, then was swallowed up by the black water, along with a man’s bare, buttered body. Eddies pulled the raft toward the bank. With all hands scrambling about, sometimes on firm footing, sometimes on a bale that sank underfoot, the sweeps were no longer manned.

Tahir Beg was threshing and screeching. His white beard marked him for a moment. Deever lunged, but a bale yielded, making his move fail for lack of footing. The brazier tipped into the water. A billow of steam, and a gust of ashes swallowed Deever when he bobbed up out of the water, just astern.

Two men were swimming toward the bank. Ilderim was cursing and blasting away at them. Deever shouted, “Never mind them, where’s Tahir?”

When he boarded the raft, he repeated, “Where’s Tahir Beg? Where’s the old man? Hold her in place! Get to the bank if you can!”

Ilderim and Ayyub manned the sweeps. The others took to the water and used the bindings of bales to secure what timbers and replace what goatskins they could. As long as too many of the blown up hides did not escape the confinement of the poplar trunks, the raft could be beached before she fell apart.

Deever peeled out of his wet clothes, and took to the water. His heart was heavy enough to pull him under. He was already certain that he was too late to help Tahir Beg. But he swam about, looking, until he was too tired to do anything else but return to the raft. Beyond any doubt, the old man had been pulled under by a whirlpool. Certainly there was no chance of finding and reviving him.

By then, Ayyub had learned that there was no need of pulling ashore and perhaps risking another encounter. “By Allah,” he said, “the load broke too fast for them, we were not surprised as they expected, we frightened them instead, and by Allah, they failed.”

No one asked about Tahir Beg. Finally Deever said, “Work toward the bank. And wrap up a bundle of food for me.”

When he stepped from the raft into shallow water, he said to Ayyub, “Sell the cargo in Bagdad, and on the way home, tell Jawan Khan I am looking for the men who caused his uncle’s death.”

There was a moment of silence, unbroken except by the sounds made by men who wanted to speak but did not know what to say. Finally Ayyub asked, “Which way will you hunt them? Toward Samarra, or back toward Imam Daur?”

Deever answered, “I don’t know yet. It all depends on what I find out there.” Here was vengeance carried to the ultimate. As a foreigner, Deever felt that he had to observe the traditions of the hills more scrupulously than the Kurds themselves would. The venture was suicidal, but there was no help for that.

CHAPTER 3.

The start was easier than Deever had expected. He went upstream, toward the hut and the vegetable patch and the scrubby trees. Presently, he recognized the bend in the bank, and caught the smell of irrigated soil, the odor of dung drying for fuel. He could just hear the sleepy cluck and chirp of roosting chickens.

The mud hut was dark. The inhabitants of this stretch of desolation have little use for artificial light, and no money to waste for that luxury. There was not even a dog. Thus there was no alarm until Deever had stood for some moments, listening to the breathing in the garlic scented darkness.

Two occupants. One must be a woman. The reek of palm oil and perfume suggested that. Probably no children. Deever, standing at the low doorway, hailed the house. The sleepy answer had hardly come when he commanded, “Outside, both of you, or it will not be well with you. Tell me who you brought out to my raft to loot it. From where did they come? Where are they going? You know. You opened the way for them.”

The man recognized the Kurdish accent. He stuttered and could not answer. His wife wailed and protested ignorance. Deever went on, “Tell me the truth. I have to find them. If I lose too much time, I’ll come back and kill you. Where can you hide if you leave this green spot?”

The peasant had no answer to that. He had no refuge, and the fear of a mountaineer’s wrath made him speak. He told of the two Arabs who had come from Samarra to wait for the skipper who refused to pay tribute. “And by Allah, sahib, they made me go out and offer you melons,” the peasant concluded. “My life, or your goods!”

“This must be the truth,” Deever said, “because it is their lives, or yours. Either will do, but the fault is theirs more than yours.”

The peasant had no changes to make in his story; so Deever went downstream. He could have had his raft wait for him, but he had not expected such an easy start. His problem was merely a matter of getting to Samarra and finding Amru, the son of Musa, who was thin-faced, thin-lipped, and had a white scar that started above the left eyebrow and reached down to the jaw. And Amru’s accomplice was Saoud, short, fat, and red-bearded.

Late that night, Deever camped. At dawn, before the sun made the brown expanse reel and shimmer, he picked up a trail—two camels, heading south. The blurred edges of the prints indicated that they had passed about twelve hours previous; shortly after the unsuccessful attempt to loot the raft. The tracks headed somewhat west of south, instead of following the Tigris.

That made Deever stop and frown. There might be little settlements in the flat waste between Samarra and the Euphrates, a hundred miles or so west. Then he saw the slow wheeling of vultures. The scavengers circled above the path of the two fast moving camels. Why would the riders prod their beasts to such a pace? Certainly not for fear of pursuing raftsmen! The vultures, Deever thought, answered the implied queries.

“One of the pirates was wounded when the shooting began,” he reasoned. “The other one tried to get him to where he lives, or to a doctor, or something.”

Deever wanted to know which man was dead; whose shallow grave already attracted vultures. Mountain, not desert, was his terrain, but camel tracks were no novelty to him. Soon he licked his dry lips and said, “Here’s where one couldn’t sit his saddle, and the other one gave him a lift. One camel carrying double now.”

God, it was hot! That goatskin water bag became heavier every minute, and his hat was far too light for the terrific sun of Iraq. The plain was no longer deadly brown, but a dancing glare. White, salty spots tormented his eyes. Deever took off his shirt and underwear and cut them into wide strips. These he wound into a crazy turban about his hat, and so protected the back of his head. Luckily, his feet were tough.

It took him two hours to reach the spot where the vultures wheeled. A small cairn of rocks encouraged him. When he began tearing it down, the birds of prey settled in a black circle. Well beyond his reach, but close enough for him to see their reptilian eyes, their featherless heads and necks; featherless, since nature had adapted them to their horrible purpose.

Deever had never seen anything quite so sickening as the intentness of those vultures. Something about their expression said to him, “You’re really one of us, you’re helping us, we can’t move those rocks.”

The company did not help Deever appreciate his mission, but he persisted. Presently, he saw that the man under the cairn was fat, red-bearded; a town Arab, and a filthy one. The peasant had told the truth, then.

Deever took the dead man’s turban. Without it, his brain would soon be too nearly cooked for any thought of finding Amru, who was thin-lipped and had a scar on his face. He cursed dead Saoud, bitterly.

Then he saw that he hated him less than he did the vultures, so he replaced the rocks.

This burial of an enemy troubled Deever. You let them lie where they fall, and if the pigs get them, all the better. But as he trudged back toward the river, he was muttering to himself. Sometimes he grinned, and once he laughed outright.

“My brain was frying. Saoud’s turban cools me off. If it weren’t for Saoud, I’d be dead soon. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be sure where to hunt Amru. Supposing I find Amru and settle him, would Amru’s kinfolk have a feud with Saoud’s kinfolk, account Saoud helped me and betrayed his partner?”

Why not? He, Deever, was hunting Amru because, mainly through ill luck, Jawan Khan’s uncle had drowned when a raft broke up. Uncle Tahir was on the way to Samarra to die. Having drowned, cool and clean, a few days short of his destination—Deever started laughing.

Then he stopped. “Shut up! Get some sense, right now.”

When a man finds something funny about a feud, that man must be sun-struck. It said in the Good Book that you demanded an eye for an eye. It also said, vengeance is Mine. But a man with a gun was an instrument of God. Anyone could figure that out. God couldn’t run around dishing out small scale vengeance. Not when He was busy making up earthquakes, floods, pestilences, things that a man couldn’t possibly devise.

“Ain’t a bit funny,” Deever said aloud. “When men ain’t got honor left, God’ll uncork a calamity that blots out a whole nation at once. So I got to get Amru. There’s nothing else a decent man can do.”

He had it all reasoned out when he was once more on the bank of the Tigris, a reeling figure in tweed coat, homespun pants, soldier’s brogans, and an incredible turban such as neither Arab nor Kurd had ever tied. Offhand, he’d be taken for a Turk.

All that day, Deever thought of Pine Ford. Perhaps it was the danger of exhaustion, of hunger, of being set upon by river Arabs who would murder a man for a pair of shoes. Perhaps it was because this quest, fantastic even to one nurtured on a grandfather’s feud traditions, was making him grope for precedents. While he scarcely realized it, he was no longer asking himself what his fellow villagers would say if he returned without vengeance, but what his folks back in Carolina would say.

Old fashioned, that’s what it was. In Grandpappy’s day, people had honor. They had to have. Life was too tough and too short to furnish much fun. A fellow didn’t have much beyond honor to live for.

Nowadays, it was different. A farmer got paid for not raising corn, not raising cotton. Suppose Grandpappy had been paid for not making moonshine? Suppose the Hatfield’s had been paid for not raising hell with the McCoys? Deever blinked the hot dust from his eyes, and said, “Uh-uh. I’m old fashioned. Getting more so, hanging around those ignorant fellows up in the hills. They’re just like our folks in Grandpappy’s time. No radio. No cars. Nothing but horses and guns. But they’re nice people.”

Getting back to the States would be practically impossible, unless he went to the U. S. Consul General at Bagdad and surrendered. One of these days he’d write, and find out, though he wasn’t sure but what he’d forgotten how. Maybe not enough witnesses were left to make a case.

Deever had five more days skirting the Tigris. Five more days of solitude, blistered feet, eyes that throbbed and grated even after a night’s sleep. Ayyub and the raft must be in Bagdad by now. A man could not begin to march as fast as the sluggish Tigris flowed. He could for a while, but the river had been at it when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, somewhere not far from here.

“Old settlers, those Chaldees,” Deever said aloud. “Four-five thousand years ago, and there’s still a few of them running around here.”

This was the first time he had a chance to ponder on his surroundings. He was doing more thinking in a few days than he had ever contrived in the entire preceding thirty years. Back home, a fellow never had to think. His elders told him what was what, just as theirs had told them.

By the time he reached Samarra, he was hungry, dizzy, and aching for a glimpse of Amru.

Right now, nothing looked finer than those great golden domes. “Surra-man-ra,” someone told him, was what the name originally was. It meant. “That-which-maketh-glad-the-beholder.” A tawny cliff rose up from the desert, jutting up and out into the Tigris. Samarra looked clean. The clear dry air created that illusion, and the intense light.

That biggest dome seemed to float above white walls, cream-colored bulwarks, lime-daubed houses. Then in the smoldering red of sunset, Deever saw the gleaming bayonets of soldiers. Some river Arabs were being turned away from the ascent to Samarra. He heard wailing, the shrilling, quavering cry of professional mourners. Out in the hell glamour of the desert, he saw a burial party, and there were no tombs; just men digging in the sands, and soldiers standing guard. A wagon, camel drawn, went with creaking axles past the sentries.

Deever saw all this from the shelter of an irrigation ditch bank. The scent that the shifting breeze brought explained things. The town was quarantined. Probably cholera. God was taking a large scale vengeance, for the murder and thievery that made Samarra a stench on the Tigris.

“Don’t reckon God needs me butting in,” Deever said. “First class pestilence’ll do more in a day than I could do in two-three years of steady shooting. Bet Amru got here just in time to get caged up.”

The plague had just broken out, and this must be the first organized move to bury the dead, for people were still trying to get into town. Clearly, the news had not yet spread. Amru must be in there.

Deever lay in the ditch until darkness, and watched the sleds and wagons haul the dead. He was worried. Suppose Amru were among those to be buried tomorrow? All the more reason to get into Samarra to find out.

CHAPTER 4.

They arrested Deever before he had got far past the outposts. One of the khaki clad Iraq soldiers said, “Five rupees, O Man, and we will let you go. It is forbidden to enter the town, there is cholera.”

“How long?” Deever’s Arabic made them think he was a Turk.

“Since this morning. It is spreading fast. Not enough medicine has come from Bagdad, not enough doctors. Until supplies come from Damascus, it will be very bad. Five rupees. Quick, before the captain comes to inspect.”

An Arab trick, letting him get past the lines, and then arresting him. Deever said, “Mafeesh!”

They did not believe him, and said they would settle for three rupees. Once more he said, “I have no money.”

A corporal came up and heard Deever say “mafeesh” to a rupee bid. He said, “The man’s a fool and a liar! Kick him into town and let him see how it is, he’ll find money when he wants to get out.”

The Arab of it again. Only, it was over-played. An officer came along, and broke into the bargaining. Deever said, “Ana inklesi.”

The officer, himself an Englishman, said, “My word! You speak like a foreigner. Unusual outfit you’re wearing, too.”

Deever explained, “You see, sir, I’m really an American missionary. Up there in the hills. I came down to help. With the cholera epidemic. Lost my horse. Men deserted—”

Deever, feigning a little more fatigue than he felt, staggered and would have fallen. The captain caught him. Later, brandy and broth revived Deever. A haggard medical officer said, “You have the devil’s own nerve, but if you mean it, you can jolly well help. You missionaries should know how.”

Deever’s imposture succeeded simply because no proper Britisher ever could predict what an American would do next. Deever’s English, halting and a little labored from long disuse, was considered natural enough for a missionary, or for a man on the verge of exhaustion. Also, the few medical and hospital corps men which the Iraq army had been able to hurry from Bagdad were too busy and too tired to be critical.

The man said he was a missionary. Doesn’t look it, but who ever had any reason to impersonate one of those bigoted chaps anyway? Who would ever come into a filthy hole like Samarra, and when there was cholera, unless he did have some silly notion of obligation or something like that?

Blast it, he probably is incompetent, but any white man is worth something. Moral effect, you know, on these beggars.

Deever diffidently said that he knew very little about medicine. Cobwebs or plug tobacco were good for staunching bullet wounds, and he could set a broken limb. Surgical skill, however, was at a discount in Samarra. Maybe he’d better just help the orderlies.

In a very few minutes, the doctor learned that Deever had a strong stomach. Grudgingly, he said, “You’ll do, I fancy.”

The hospital was a tavern whose courtyard and stalls and traveler’s cubicles had been hastily cleared. The patients were laid out on pallets of straw. Torches flared in the still, reeking air. Arab orderlies, wearing gauze masks over their faces, were doing their best to give water to those who were blazing in the fever of the third stage. These might live; they had passed that fatal second stage, and had a bare chance. The doctor looked up from a patient who had just got an injection of saline solution. “Deever, never mind cleaning up. God man, you can’t, not now.” He gestured. “Get them out! Over there!”

“Uh—um—how’ll I know for sure that they’re dead, sir?”

The doctor cursed and went to the next pallet. He was too busy with those who might pull through to have much thought for those who were cold, turning blue, losing their voices. As an afterthought he turned and croaked, “Do your best, if you make a mistake, it won’t be bad—those poor devils in that row haven’t a chance anyway!”

Deever soon learned to tell which were finished, which were in a coma and might live until the reaction, high fever and a fair chance of recovery. He became used to the odors, used to seeing those blue-brown corpses trotted out by stretcher bearers. He finally became as numb as the haggard doctors, and ceased wondering when the sanitary corps men would stop bringing in new cases.

All he knew by morning was that more space was needed. They were collapsing, out in the town, faster than they were dying in the tavern.

A warehouse was cleared. Planes from Iraq brought more supplies. Trucks roared in from across the desert, with cots, sterilizers, water purifiers. More soldiers came in, to quell riots that started when orthodox Moslems protested against mass cremations with petrol. The burying squads could no longer dig trenches deep enough nor rapidly enough. And Deever, just from watching, learned how to do doctor’s duty; the routine was simple enough, after all.

If you made a mistake, the poor fellow would die anyway, nine times out of ten. If women refused to unveil, refused treatment from an infidel hakim, what difference, maybe they were right. If terrified orphans stole water from condemned wells—and every well was condemned—cholera was quicker than starvation! It was grim, it was horrible, it was quite unreal to Deever. He could understand dying from knife or gunshot wounds; from infections following compound fractures, up there in the mountains, when a horse slipped on a narrow trail or an icy ledge. These were chances a man had to take, and the odds were decent. But now: terror, hunger, sudden collapse, and no defense.

Soldiers shooting looters. Short tempered, frightened soldiers shooting instead of bothering to challenge anyone trying to slip through the cordon about the accursed town. What difference did it make? “Ya Allah! If they all die, then we’ll march away, if we do not die.” That was what the soldier told Deever, and Deever said, “That is true, O Man! And you are afraid, so you will die before they do.”

Half an hour later, he returned. The soldier was doubled up with cramps. His rifle lay in a pool of filth. Dogs were gathering about him. They were hungry, and would eat him, if no one came in time.

Deever was no longer sickened, and he had ceased to be afraid. He despised Arabs. Since they were afraid, he was too stubborn to let fear get even a secret hold on him. And then, he had to find Amru. He was too tired to see the monstrous jest of it all, hunting a man down to shoot him so that the plague would not first kill him.

This intentness made him scrutinize every warped face, and question those he was now treating in their houses. There was no longer any place that could be cleared up to receive new cases. Deever lost track of sunrise and sunset, dusk and dawn. The medicines he gave, the dead he marked for taking away, the living took from befouled houses, the water he sterilized and distributed; these things now became the way of vengeance.

“No, that’s not Amru. Isn’t this one, either.” Another shot of saline. Was it calcium chloride, sodium chloride? Potassium chloride? What difference? “Huh—no, no scar on his face!”

Adrenaline. That’s what they needed over in this section. All sorted out. You don’t have to think. It’s routine here. Once, crossing a torch-lit square, he saw a white-bearded Arab with rolling eyes. The old man gestured at Deever, and called, “Behold, O Men! The hakim—see his look, see its madness! Allah is upon him. O Madman, touch us and we will be healed!”

Deever understood only a few words, but they were enough. The Arabs thought that his wits were in Paradise, that Allah loved him, and had given him strange powers. The old man reminded him of Tahir Beg. But the old man did not know anyone named Amru.

Deever did not know when it was that he saw a thin-faced man hauled out of a hovel and toward a sled. He did not know exactly in what quarter of Samarra he was at the moment. He was not certain why he had left the hospital. But he was certain that this man was Amru. The scar, to be sure, was a strong hint; but Deever knew.

He said to the one who crouched, not ill but feigning illness, “Who is that man?”

For answer, a stare. Who cared about names now?

Deever booted the fellow to his feet. “Who is he?” He drew his gun. He had kept it, without any good reason beyond instinct. “Speak!”

“Wallah, sahib. That is Amru, the son of Musa!”

Deever raised his hand. “Steady, you two! Don’t stack on another one.”

“But he is dead, sahib,” the porters protested. “So are these.”

Deever stooped. There was no pulse. The wrist was ice cold. The scarred cheek was cold. Amru the son of Musa had outwitted vengeance. Deever gestured, and the sled dragged on, bump-bump-chunk.

“I’m in this pest hole. Can’t get out. Got to help these folks, anyway. Maybe that’s why it happened, they needed help for a spell.”

He watched the sled go down the cobble stone paving. One of the grisly cargo fell off. He shouted at the driver. The man did not hear. Deever cursed, would have run after him, but he was too tired. He watched the vehicle round the corner.

Better get back to work. An orderly stood there, listlessly, like a dead man who has forgotten to drop. The fellow had Deever’s kit, and was waiting, masked, fatalistic, weary.

“None in here, sahib,” he reported, coming out of the next house.

A second, third; and with the same report. Deever scarcely heard. The orderly stared at him, suddenly alert, and backed away. Abruptly, Deever said, “Wait here—no, come with me! Hurry, hurry, ya kalb!”

He staggered, then ran, stretching long uncertain legs. He knew the route of the sleds, and he overtook the jouncing vehicle before it passed the lines. He stopped it. Amru was on top of the heap. Deever said, “Get a stretcher bearer.”

The orderly grumbled, “He’s dead.”

The men who attended the drag said, “By Allah, the dead are dead.”

“Look, brother of a dog! His leg moved,” Deever shouted. “Take him off, take him off!”

The leg had moved, up, up, up; it touched the man’s chin. The attendants shook their heads. “Allah upon you, master! The dead often move, the soul is gone a moment before the life of the body, it is not well to bring back life into what is left. Wallah, we must bury it.”

Muscular contraction, a purely mechanical thing, was terrifying to the uninitiated.

“Take him off!” Deever’s voice rang, deep and commanding now. New life came to him. “Take him to the hospital!”

Wide-eyed, the man obeyed. They could not help but obey, for this infidel had strange powers and the light in his bloodshot eyes was fearsome. He was looking beyond the veil between life and death.

CHAPTER 5.

Two hours later, Amru the son of Musa developed a high fever. The chill of death had yielded; reaction set in, and internal fires parched the patient. But Deever scarcely knew this. He scarcely understood when the surgeon said, “By Jove, you were right!” His vision blurred. He began groping for support, trying to reach the wall of what had once been a stable. “You need rest, old man—the worst is over—fewer cases.”

Deever wanted to yell for help, but he was afraid to. If he needed help, then he had been finally stricken by cholera. If his weakness left him in a few moments, then he’d know it was merely rest that he needed; rest which he could now take, since the crisis was over, since Samarra would not be entirely depopulated. Legs were numb. “God, I’m stumbling!” He was afraid now. Mere uneasiness gave way to fear. He tried to yell, but cramps doubled him, and he did fall, into blackness interwoven with knives. They reached into his vitals.

He scarcely knew when they picked him up. The avenger and his victim were the toys of cholera. Vengeance had become a silly thing. Deever in the first stage, Amru the son of Musa in the last; either to live, to be burned to death by fever, or frozen in that cold blue stage.

When Deever finally realized that he was alive and in Samarra, the pestilence was under control. No new cases were coming in. And a rigid quarantine had kept river or caravan traffic from carrying the disease downstream to Bagdad.

In the days that followed, he gathered his strength, and collected his wits. Ayyub and the raft men must long since have sold the merchandise and set out on their return to the mountains. They must for some days have been home, and telling of his blind quest of vengeance in the desert.

Asima would be worrying. She probably considered herself a widow. While no one would know that the pursuit had led him to pestilential Samarra, it would readily enough be assumed that he would by now have returned, unless a desert ambush had accounted for him. Asima would be proud of him, and so would all his adopted tribesmen. He had died upholding a tradition, and more zealously than any native Kurd.

To correct that error, Deever dragged himself through the desolate streets of Samarra, asking each survivor for news of Amru the son of Musa. Somehow, he remembered the fellow. That sharp, thin face; that long scar, those large front teeth.

He had pursued him and he had overtaken him. Here, in Samarra. It was all hazy, confusing. Doctors had been relieved, new ones had come in. There were no records which would help. Deever’s only way was to hurry, hunt, find; and before the quarantine guards were disbanded, and the survivors were released.

The natives remembered Deever. They salaamed when he passed. “Ya sidi,” a woman cried, and tried to kiss his hand. “O my Lord! O Favored of Allah! My son lives!”

Deever gathered that she was trying to thank him for finding her son, who lay unconscious in an alley, unable to cry out for help. For the first time in his exile, he lost some of his contempt for Arabs. The woman’s tears were wet on the back of his hand. An old man knelt, kissed the skirt of Deever’s coat. “O thou servant of the Life-Giving! Thou servant of the Living!”

“Quit it,” he muttered in English. “Damn it, that’s not sanitary.”

Well, maybe it was. The coat had been disinfected and was all shrunk and wrinkled. Everything was sanitary. Creosote, chloride of lime, they made the air sting and reek. Every corner, every drain was sterile. But you can’t have people running around kneeling and slopping over like that. It embarrassed him. He had a man to kill, and he wanted to get it over with. As he broke from his grateful patients, he said half aloud, “Too much rumpus about it all. Damn fools, don’t know I didn’t come here to help them.”

A few paces brought him to the square, near the mosque whose golden dome he had seen from afar, days previous, guiding him to vengeance. Coming from a narrow alley, the sudden glare blinded him a little. He squinted, looked around for a place to sit down and rest. His legs were wobbly. To the right was the serai, and the horse market. First get a mount, then find Amru, then wait for the quarantine to end.

Another man was kneeling at his feet. Others, who had come with him, were still pointing at Deever and saying, “This is the hakim. Here he is, he who brought the dead back to life. Yea, this is the Servant of the Life-Giving, verily, Abd-ul-Hai!”

Then it came back to Deever, and all the confusion became order. He remembered the man he had taken from the sled. This was that man: Amru the son of Musa. Deever raised him to his feet. It was strange and rather dizzying, looking at that peaked face, that parchment skin stretched over high cheek bones; a beak of a nose, and sunken, dark eyes. Lips still black and cracked from fever. Deever thought, “He looks a lot like me. I ought to look worse, but I guess it didn’t hit me so hard.”

Amru said, “My kinsmen in Samarra are dead, all dead. But I have a brother in Imam Daur. Give me the hire of a camel, ya hakim.”

This was the tradition and the custom: whoever directly saves a man’s life is henceforth responsible for his welfare. There was a difference between all those whom Deever and the doctors had treated as routine, and this Amru, whom Deever had singled out for an especial salvation. Thus, it was proper to demand food and necessities.

“I am going north,” Deever said, “when the guards let us out. I’ll get an extra donkey. Have you eaten?”

Amru pointed toward the field kitchen where rations were served to the survivors. Deever handed him some coins. “I have just eaten at the loqanda. There are cucumbers and pilou and eggplants stuffed with mutton. Go and eat, then wait at the serai.”

There were two reasons why Deever gave him coins. If he broke bread with him, he could not kill him for at least three days thereafter. This also was the tradition. Then, as a white missionary, he could not eat with an Arab. The emergency was over, and the officers would shake their heads and frown.

The following day, the quarantine was discontinued. The only mounts available were sorry specimens, and the demand was so high that Deever and Amru dared not waste any time bargaining, or looking for better donkeys. Most of the survivors, it seemed, wanted to get out of that ill-omened town. A haggard horde filed down the headland, then parted, some going toward the boat landing and Bagdad, others upstream, toward Tikrit, Mosul, or north into Armenia.

Deever was worried from the start. First, the crowd. Settling a true believer would be an insane trick. He could not risk it. He told himself this, and added, “And I can’t push these donkeys. They’ll drop in their tracks.”

He was weaker than he realized. He clung to the high pommel of the saddle, and with difficulty kept his seat. Amru was not faring much better. Men and beasts were hardly fit for travel. So Deever and his companion lost ground, for being among the last stricken, they were the last to recover. Bit by bit, the crowd thinned, going in twos and threes. Some followed obscure trails toward unmapped settlements in the plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

That evening, Deever had his chance, for no travelers were within sight or earshot. He drew his revolver. Amru watched, being too weary for much curiosity. “O Man,” Deever said, resting the heavy weapon on his knee, “there is a feud between you and the Shuan Kurds, for the death of one Tahir Beg, the uncle of Jawan Khan. You and a certain Saoud cut my raft apart. Tahir Beg drowned and his life is on your head.”

For a long moment Amru sat there, staring, color slowly receding. His skinny hands clenched, and he swayed a little. He looked about, wildly, scanning the gloom and finding neither light nor friend. He understood now that this was no missionary, but one of those merciless wild men from the Zagros Mountains. He knew all but one thing: whether he would die at once, or whether he would live until some kinsman of Tahir Beg could strike the stroke.

“There is no might and no majesty save in God,” he said. “Verily, Allah gave me into your hands to save me, and now he gave me again into your hands to slay me, and there is no help for it.”

A small bed of coals separated avenger and victim. He did not beg a moment for prayer, nor did he ask if the old man’s kinsmen would come to meet Deever and the victim of vengeance.

“The man who came out in the kuffa, hiding you and Saoud,” Deever went on, “told me, and it was easy for me after that. But do not curse him. He knew that if I did not find you quickly, I would return and kill him.”

Slowly Deever rose. The whole thing was crazy. He could not for a moment deny that Amru’s death was in order. That would be justice and honor, among his own people as well as among the Kurds who had adopted him. But now Deever knew that he could not deal justice; that he had himself blocked justice, by keeping Amru from burial, and by having that lingering flicker of life flame again.

He had faced the desert and he had faced pestilence to win this moment, and now he was wasting it. “Out of hotness into fire,” old Tahir Beg’s words rang in his ears. “Out of fire into hell.” Vengeance leads to vengeance, blood cries for blood, and there is no end to it. Pestilence and famine, flood and war, they do their work, and why need one man exact eye or tooth? Plague in Samarra, Deever decided, wiped out the feud between him and Amru. They had both been in the hands of Allah, and he had spared them both.

So he said, “Take this gun. It is well known among the Shuan Kurds. Give it to them and say that I, Yakoub, was still alive when you found me, after I had taken vengeance on Amru. Alive, but that no doctor could keep me from going where I was bound to go.”

Amru could not understand this. Deever went on, “No one knows but what I died honorably, slaying you as my duty ordered. Now rub your head and go your way, for I cannot kill you, since Allah spared us.”

Amru went. He was more than ever convinced that a saint or, what to him was the same, a madman had twice saved him. He would be afraid not to execute his mission. And Deever knew this, so he turned and went toward Bagdad.

The chain of vengeance was broken by the shattering of this one link. He was free again. And he would surrender to the United States Consul in Bagdad. He was hungry for the fumes of frying bacon, the odor of freshly baked corn bread, the tang of corn whiskey. And these would be waiting, finally. The music would not be too hard to face; not with voluntary surrender following twelve years of the freest life on earth. Perhaps the witnesses against him were scattered or dead. Perhaps the only charge that could stick would be one of obstructing justice.

Though these details scarcely occurred to Deever. He was not planning or calculating. He had qualms about leaving Asima, but after all, she was to all intents and purposes the widow of a man who had died upholding tribal honor. So his head was high and his heart was light as he rode south. He had news for his own people: a way of getting rid of the burden of vengeance. Grandfather was wrong, and someone had to set him right.