Little Lost Lambs at the Post Read online

  This story Din discounted heavily, especially as the prisoners did not look like ordinary bandits. One, as tall as the major when he stood up, did not seem to be more than twenty years old. In his homespun blue shirt and baggy pants, he looked like a freshman track athlete ready to take the field, and not pleased with his handcuffs. His dark eyes fastened on Din’s service blouse with its insignia and ribbons. Ho dirt not seem to expect anything good from the appearance of this strange officer. The other tribesman, old and pockmarked, snarled at the American, who was considering how to use them as hostages to the best advantage.

  “They don’t look like horse thieves to me,” he murmured, “and I think—”

  “Major, this young one is Kandir Beg, son of Iskander Khan, the top Bor Ahmadi chieftain. He was pulled off one of the post horses and disarmed after a savage battle.”

  “Rats,” said the one called Kadir Beg. Doc stared, startled.

  “Where did you learn English?” Din wanted to know.

  “At the American school for boys in Teheran.” The youngster smiled without amusement. “We had no rifles. My horse was tired from carrying two.” He hesitated. “We stopped to change saddle to a Kazerun horse, and leave mine. These gendarmes used their butts.”

  “What’s your name?” Din asked sharply.

  The boy was silent, tight-lipped.

  “All right,” observed Din, who could use the son of a khan just then. “Technically you may be guilty of stealing a horse. Actually no horse was stolen. I’ll take you two with me. I’ll be responsible,” he added firmly, as Doc started to protest.

  “Major, sir,” cried the physician, “you are making a Grade-A mistake. If you use kind charity on these bandits, they will shoot you in your back.”

  “Rats,” said the boy called Kadir Beg.

  By Din’s reckoning, he was not making a mistake. “Take the manacles off them,” be ordered, and watched the gendarmes carry out his order.

  What happened then took place very quickly. Din’s eye followed the unexpected action before he could act himself. Without apparently exchanging a word, the tribesmen separated, the old one bounding into the sentry, who fell, dropping his rifle. Kadir Beg yelled like an Indian, jumped for a horse, and forked nicely into the saddle, jerking the rein loose. He wheeled the beast into the gendarmes, covering his companion, who took the other saddled horse. They started across the road.

  With a wail like a siren, the ancient Pir Solomon held out a rifle from the car. This rifle Din recognized as his own Springfield, with five serviceable cartridges in the clip. Kadir caught it neatly as he passed heading toward a gully across the road.

  The sentry got to his knee, sighted and sent a slug after the riders. Din thought he fired high deliberately, thus discharging his duty and avoiding wounding a Bor Ahmadi.

  “Well,” said Din. He jumped into the nearest jeep and started it going. Taking the ditch across the road, he bounced over a bank and dodged through brush toward the gully, to head off the fugitives. Sighting him, they headed through a nest of bonders. When Din circled these, he heard the sharp “clonkk” of the Springfield, and felt that the slug had passed close to his head.

  He pulled up, to watch the two riders disappear into the gully, winch led up into the hills. Studying the terrain, Din saw that the gully wound up in the same direction as the road, toward a single bald height a couple of miles up. This height stood out like a giant’s watchtower, affording good observation of all the countryside. Backing to the road, Din called to Doc— avoiding at the moment any discussion of what had just happened by his own doing—to get the men into the other vehicles and follow him.

  Then he let out the jeep, heading uphill toward his observation post. Visibility would soon be bad, he noticed, because sunset was already outlining the crests of Bor Ahmadi land. Into the trail of dust behind him, the truck and the other jeep followed faithfully after him.

  When he stopped under the high knob, studded with rocks and twisted pines, a crimson afterglow filled the sky. By the time he had worked his way up into the pines toward this observation post, Doc Itty and Ibrahim panted up to him, protesting.

  “Major, you will meet with nth-degree peril from this hour of dark here. You should go back to the Kazerun post quickly, quickly.”

  Ibrahim pointed up, and raised his rifle. Din glanced along the line of the piece and saw something dark move between the rocks that might have been a mountain sheep or a human being. He pushed Ibrahim’s rifle aside and went up to investigate.

  By circling the rocks, he beheld a small stream, and a small woman’s figure crawling along it to a clump of pines. When he came up to her, she lay still, frightened and waiting. She had the brown eyes of a gazelle and the slenderized body that a motion-picture starlet would have given a year’s salary for. When Din stood over her, she tried to draw the edge of a black silk scarf across her face.

  “Hello, Sweetheart,” said he, “of the World.”

  The girl did not answer. She shivered under the bite of the chill night wind. Din thought she could very well be his quarry, hiding out along the road. But when Doc came up and questioned her, she would not give her name. Instead, she went into a spasm of coughing.

  Peering down at her, Doe reached for her wrist suddenly. “She has a temperature, major.”

  “She still looks like our city girl to me. Look at those clothes.”

  Doc fidgeted, eying the sunset glow, which was dimming out. “How will you ascertain that identity?” he demanded.

  “Take her back to Shiraz, and see.”

  At the word “Shiraz,” the girl broke into speech as liquid as the rushing stream beside her—and as persistent.

  “She says,” the physician interpreted, “she must wait here. She will cast herself bodily from the mountain if you try to take her to Shiraz.”

  In times past, the Virginian had dealt with hysteria of the teen-age variety, and he proceeded to do so now by picking up the supposed Sweetheart abruptly. She weighed no more than a manikin, but the instant he lifted her she twisted out of his grip. She plopped to the ground and proceeded to throw herself bodily into the adjacent pool of water.

  It was deep enough to wet even the mass of her dark hair, and, when Din fished her out, she was coughing raggedly. And the physician in Doc spoke out sharply. This girl might have pneumonia. She could not be driven all the way to Shiraz in the night cold. What she needed immediately was blankets, heat and hot tea.

  For the second time, the Virginian flipped a coin in his mind. “All right, Doc,” he said, pulling off his blouse. “We can get the cars up here. Tell Ibrahim to set up my tent, double time.”

  “Here?” cried Doc.

  “Here,” assented Din, drawing his blouse over the girl’s shoulders.

  When the major’s small tent was set up, the cot erected, the lantern and primus stove burning, Sweetheart’s mood changed. She seemed willing to stay put. Obedient to request, when the men stepped out of the tent she discarded her wet silk skirt and waist, dried herself and put on Din’s one pair of pajamas. He had to help her into the sleeping bag, which seemed to be strange to her, with its slide fastener. And he heard something like a giggle when he tucked the cover under her ears, spreading out her hair to dry near the stove.

  This heartened Din, who was worried about her, and Doc was brewing a concoction out of his medical kit on the stove when a bullet cut through the tent top. A second later, a rifle’s heavy “clonkk” sounded… from more than a hundred yards away. Din thought.

  He said, “Um!” and mechanically put out the lantern and pulled the sleeping bag with Sweetheart in it from the cot to the ground. Hurrying out of the tent, his eyes not adjusted to the darkness, he collided with a parked jeep, and then with a running gendarme. He felt his way to the rocks at the edge of the round top of the hillock.

  A half dozen rifles flashed up at him from the dark slope, and he squatted, to be out of the sky gleam. He heard the gendarmes gathering behind him.

  “A
i-a!” A high-pitched call echoed among the rocks.

  He heard Doc whisper, “They want to confer with you.”

  A deep voice hailed from below, in Persian. Din reflected that in these mountains they seemed to fire first and challenge afterward.

  Doc explained, “The Bor Ahmadi have surrounded you. They tell you how to surrender. Make a light, please, and send down gendarmes one by one, leaving rifles behind. They give you only five minutes to comply with regulations. Otherwise they will come up. Be quick, please, major.”

  Din reflected some more, feeling the bite of the cold wind. He felt more than that. He felt this was a tough spot. For all he knew, the girl in the tent might be a Bor Ahmadi. That might make for complications, but could not be helped now. The one thing he could not do was to surrender a detachment of gendarmes with all weapons and vehicles to a bunch of marauding tribesmen. If he did that, he and the colonel might as well pack their stuff and go home.

  “Doc,” he said wearily, “tell those commandos down there to stay away from this hilltop or they will be hurt.”

  “Please—”

  “Do as I order you,” said Din, and felt like a fool.

  When the physician was through hailing, Din had him explain to his men that he meant to hold the hilltop, and that any man who wanted an easier way out could go down the slope, leaving his rifle.

  The four gendarmes and three drivers squatted around him, breathing hard. But no man, not even the physician, backed out.

  “You are making another mistake, major,” muttered Doc. “But I cannot leave my patient.” The others stared eagerly toward Din, as if they expected him to produce a miracle. As if he were a tin god.

  Three minutes later, the Bor Ahmadi came up through the darkness, laughing and howling evidently expecting a token resistance, if any.

  “Lights,” said Din, after a moment of this.

  The headlights of the two jeeps flashed on, crisscrossing the declivity from the angles where Din had placed them hurriedly. Twenty blue figures of tribesmen showed in the open. The staccato discharge of four rifles from behind the headlights scattered them. Then the headlights blacked out.

  In the ensuing silence, as Din strained his ears, he heard a plaintive voice, “Yamricai—yamricai!” Sweetheart of the World tugged at his arm, saying a lot of things in Persian.

  “Stop this foolish fighting, she says, major,” Doc Itty’s voice interpreted. “Kadir Beg is wanting to see her. She is giving you a talsmin—what you call a token—so she can keep Kadir Beg from killing dead all of us except her.”

  The girl’s hot fingers felt for Din’s hand and pushed something into it. It seemed to be a bracelet.

  “The hell with all this,” muttered Din, trying to watch the obscurity below.

  “If she knows Kadir Beg, she may be Bor Ahmadi,” Doc warned.

  The girl seemed to sense Din’s anxiety. She pressed his hand against the heartbeat in her side, and her damp hair brushed his cheek. “Please, mister,” she begged in English.

  Mentally, Din caved in. He couldn’t organize any decent defense with a teenage girl wandering around in pajamas with incipient pneumonia.

  Snatching up the electric torch, he lifted it to illuminate himself and the ground, and stepped over the rim of the rocks. An excellent target, he thought, as he headed down the slope, still gripping the girl’s bracelet. He was very tired of trying to be a policeman.

  Pointing toward where he had last seen the tribesmen, he sensed figures rising around him. When he heard the bolt of a rifle click, he stopped. Kadir Beg stepped into the circle of light with Din’s Springfield on his arm. His eyes were thoughtful, and somehow surprised.

  “Major,” he said slowly, “that was a swell trick you played on us. It stopped us.”

  “Um,” said Din.

  “But it will not work again. Now you have made a good token resistance, you can jolly well give in. There’s nothing else you can do. I have forty men here, and more are coming in.”

  On either side of him, Din glimpsed husky tribesmen watching. “Forget all that about surrender,” he said. “I have a girl up there.”

  “I know you have.” The young Bor Ahmadi smiled without amusement. “That is why we have come.”

  Din held out the bracelet. “Her identification. Is she yours, Kadir Beg?”

  “She certainly is.”

  “Then for Pete’s sake take her someplace else. She’s sick.”

  “Mihr-i-Jahan ill?”

  Young Kadir Beg certainly moved quickly. He took another look at the bracelet, and jumped past Din up the slope. His men went after him, Din following with the light, praying that no more shooting would break loose.

  The rush of the tribesmen carried them to the crest and to the tent. When Din played his light inside, he saw Sweetheart of the World sitting up in his sleeping bag, crying, with her arms wrapped around Kadir Beg’s neck. No one said anything. Doc lit the lantern. Din felt that he could no longer cope with this situation.

  “She is saying,” Doc interpreted mechanically, “how he is the only, heart of her heart, and so on, and she knew he would come back to her with a horse, but how cold she was until you lit the stove.”

  Evidently she said more than that; because Kadir Beg disengaged himself and faced Din. “You are not going to take her back to Shiraz I” he cried. “The minister, her father, would not let her marry because he said she was too young. She is not too young. That is why she eloped with me last night from the school.”

  “Ah,” said Doc Itty.

  “The girls’ academy claims it was raided by the Bor Ahmadi,” Din pointed out mildly.

  “It would. My servant and I brought horses to the school gate. We left Mihr-i-Jahan here, on the way to my home to get fresh horses from the Kazerun herd. That is our story, and it is true.” The boy’s eyes blazed. “Now what are you going to do about it, Mr. Gendarme?”

  He still had Din’s Springfield in his fist. The tent entrance was packed solid with interested and armed hillmen. Militarily, the situation had deteriorated. There remained Sweetheart, and—What had the colonel said? “The Bor Ahmadi are tough, but they still believe in fairy tales.”

  “Do?” hazarded Din. “Well—”

  His questing glance fell upon his discarded blouse, and upon the top of a book projecting from it. Hafiz.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said suddenly. “You hand back that rifle of mine and those two Kazerun horses. And I’ll abide by the verdict of Hafiz.”

  “Hafiz!” cried Sweetheart.

  Doc Itty inhaled deep.

  Waving the little book, Din thrust his finger into the pages with the air of a magician, and the gallery at the gate edged closer. Calmly Din read aloud the verse at his finger’s tip:

  “Down in the quarter where they sell red wine,

  My holy carpet scarce would, fetch a cup.”

  “Nothing could be clearer,” he exclaimed. “ ‘Where they sell red wine’ must be Shiraz. Mihr-i-Jahan must go down to Shiraz tomorrow.” He waved for silence as Kadir Beg started to interrupt. “Listen. ‘Fetch a cup’ is Hafiz’s way of saying ‘medical aid’—in other words, the hospital where she has to visit. But, wait. Here we have ‘holy carpet.’ What can that mean but a holy man, a preacher, Archbishop Solomon himself, who will marry you two young people first, here tonight?” He shut the book. “I’ll be witness, and I’ll guarantee to make it all right with the parents, because it does seem to me that the bride is old enough to be married, especially after she is married.”

  For a count of five, Kadir Beg looked at him.

  “I can guarantee that,” said Din rapidly, “on my word as a gentleman, a diplomat and a major in the gendarmerie, because I have made myself responsible for both of you.”

  Suddenly, Kadir Beg grinned and held out his hand. Sweetheart of the World, watching her man, smiled. Din felt abashed; these two youngsters didn’t take stock in Hafiz; they trusted him simply because he had made them a promise.

  Doc Itty
, watching all of them, let out a long sigh. “A most beautiful oracle,” said he with feeling, “for everyone.”

  The Major Meets an Enchantress

  BRUSHING a sleeping scorpion off a marble bench, Maj. John D. Alford, of Tazewell County, Virginia, and the United States Army seated himself in the shade of the mosque of the Mother of Shah Hussein. He inhaled deeply of the powdered dust in the air, exhaled to let the air, such as it was, cool the sweat beneath his cleanest blouse. Then glancing at his wrist watch, he allowed his lanky frame to assume its natural state of rest while he waited with some misgivings for the opening performance of his band by which he hoped to introduce martial American music to the historic city of Isfahan.

  In the days of his grandfathers and other Victorians, Isfahan had been sloganed as the city of The Thousand and One Nights, Iran—Persia to the Victorians—had been called the land of romance. On both counts. Major Alford considered, the older generation had been wrong as usual.

  Perhaps in that remote age the courtyard of the mosque of "the Mother of Shah Hussain had been filled with Oriental splendor. Now it gaped empty, its dry poplars rose lifeless above him, its long pool revealed to his eyes only dried mud. At this sunset hour the massed citizenry of Isfahan look the air outside, along the Chahar Bagh, which meant the Four Gardens and was the main street, leading to the great stone bridge and the wandering river. Owing to a drought, that river had dwindled to stagnant pools. Instead of camel bells, the major heard only jingling bicycle bells, the clattering of droshkies and pounding of motors, above the chorus of Iranian voices in the Chahar Bagh—resembling very much the Mall in Central Park, New York, of a late Sunday afternoon.

  Major Alford was twenty-four; he read himself to sleep at night with the pages of The Thousand and One Nights, unexpurgated; he had a high opinion of this thing called romance, but, as yet, he had never encountered it—certainly not as demolition expert in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. He had been sent to Isfahan by his American colonel, who was head of the small group of officers training the Imperial Iranian Gendarmerie. "Something seems to have happened to the morale of the Isfahan regiment, his colonel had stated. "Fix it, Din."