Talbot Mundy

“ But Ayisha said nothing. She chose to get back between the curtains of the shibriyah, and I saw Narayan Singh on the far side whispering to her.
“For,” as he told me afterward, “the time to persuade a woman you are her friend is when she is afraid or distracted by doubt. At all other times she is like a leopard; but then she is like a lost sheep!”
The silence was at an end now. Every one was shouting; the real Ali Higg’s men wanting to know what had happened and Ali Baba’s answering them with threats if they dared disobey and come closer. ”

“ Disobey by as much as a word or a sign, and you’re dead. Do we understand each other?”
“You really mean it? You will go to Petra?”
“Yes.”
“I have seen fools and men in love and gamblers, but you are the greatest madman of them all,’” she answered. “Very well, I will speak to him as you say.”
Grim mounted his camel and rode to the top of a ridge of sand about twenty yards away, where he halted and sat motionless. If he really looked so much like Ali Higg, as seemed to be the case, no one at that distance could have doubted his identity. ”

“ She began to make the gesture of washing hands, but thought better of it, for I might have mistaken that for a signal. Old Ibrahim ben Ah looked straight into her eyes, read resolution there, and bowed like a courtier to a queen. ”

“ Shout to ’em; d’you hear!”
“Ayisha! What does this mean? Ali? Ali Higg? You here? I don’t understand!”
“You’ll be dead before you understand if you don’t call those men off,” Grim answered; and his pistol demonstrated that he meant it, for her men were closing in on us.
So she knelt up on her camel and cried out that Ali Higg was there, bidding them keep their distance.
“But what does this mean? Ali? And you speak English? Since when? Oh! I must be mad! You are not Ali Higg! No! ”

“ Now, observe—I pass my pistol to this Indian.”
He handed it to me.
“He will shoot you dead if you make one false move. You will tell Ibrahim ben Ah to take all his men at once to that next oasis on the way to El-Maan, and to wait there for yourself and Ali Higg—to wait as long as three days if necessary. ”

“ Don’t forget, you fellows who have. to call on a girl a dozen Sunday evenings in succession before she will go to the movies or condescend to sit out a dance with you, that east of the fifteenth meridian the situation is reversed, and the man who wasn’t swift about his wooing would stand no chance at all. Modesty of approach is reckoned a sure sign of unworthiness, and deference as cowardice that fears to seize an opportunity. ”