Page:Oriental Stories v01 n01 (1930-10).djvu/93

 instilled in him by the stark mystery of Kairouan. When the performance was ended and the charmer put the cobras and the livelier, non-poisonous wood snakes back into their gunny-sacks, Weiss was plumbing ever deeper into wells of barricaded desire; and he was planning, planning.

He stared at the sacks, moving with their deadly freight. He glanced furtively at Dancherman—less furtively at Dancherman's woman. And Kairouan was off the face of the civilized earth, with policemen and law courts a thousand miles away.

A child should have been more subtle than Weiss.

an hour every Arab in Kairouan knew that the undersized little tourist with the shallow chin and the soft brown eyes had bought one of the charmer's cobras. The house-boy saw him carrying a gunny-sack toward Dancherman's room, holding the sack away from him at arm's length, his face gray with fear of the thing he carried. And everyone noticed how he kept Dancherman's wife downstairs by the tinkly piano until long after Dancherman had gone to bed.

As Weiss played on and on, obliging with some of his own popular song hits as well as with the frankly better tunes of others, he began to get uneasy. His fingers trembled on the keys; though to hide this he played louder and louder.

Upstairs was a man cold in bed; beside him a writhing thing that splayed its hooded neck and crawled across the stiffened limbs

He cringed, and missed a beat in the neat syncopation of the piece he was playing. Where had Dancherman been bitten? Or—had he seen the coiled form under the blankets in time to avoid it? TTiis was unlikely. He would have been down again long before now, telling of the narrow escape, a little suspicious, perhaps, but unable to make any accusations in this land of snakes and wildness.

No. The snake must have done its work, because Dancherman had gone into his room and not come out again. But—Weiss missed another beat as this fact, too, began to seem threatening—surely he must have felt the stab of the cobra's fangs. And surely he must have become aware of the slowly moving coils the instant he got into bed. Why, then, was there no uproar—no rushing about and poking into other beds to see if there were more of the deadly things in the house?

He looked at the watch on his wrist and noted that it had been over an hour since Dancherman had left the room. And now, beside him, the woman with the little glints in her dark eyes must be told that the hints she had thrown him during the trip had borne fruit—that she was free to take the man she had seemed to prefer to her husband.

Three elderly men poked out the stubs of their cigars at about the same instant, and rose to leave the lounge. Weiss watched them go, their figures blurring in his sight as they filed out the door and left him alone with Mrs. Dancherman.

He stopped playing and turned to her. It didn't take long to describe to her some of what had happened. She guessed a part of it from the look on his face; and before he was half through with his mumbled story she had risen and was looking at him as though he were loathsome in her sight.

Under the look, Weiss drew into himself, and he swayed on the stool as he saw her throat swell to a scream. He foresaw the end of all things for himself in that alarm—confused crowds surrounding him, eyes growing harder as they stared at him, a talc of self-confessed murder, retribution!