Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/72

 Hector pulled the frayed rope. Came a brushing of feet on a rug inside, and the door of the shop sprang open to disclose a very old, very tall, white-bearded Oriental who peered from beneath bushy brows with shrewd, patient eyes.

“Be pleased to enter, saheb,“ he said, in halting English and a slurring, foreign accent.

Hector smiled.

India? Asia?

Why! It began here, in the gray heart of London! And so he dropped into gliding Hindustani, the language which his Behari nurse had taught him and which he had never forgotten.

“Apanan duari,” he said, the words coming smoothly, evenly, without the trace of an accent, “kukoro hariyar, ya sheik!”

Ali Yusuf Khan smiled in return. But he shook his head.

“No, no!” he continued in his halting English. “I am no—ah—Hindu. I speak—Persian.”

“So do I!” rejoined Hector in the latter language; and the other, with sudden excitement, took him by the arm and pulled him across the threshold into the shop that lay beneath a fretted Damascan brass lamp in a mass of delicate purple and heliotrope shadows.

“Good, by Allah!” he exclaimed. “I am an old and very stupid camel. I cannot twist my withered tongue around the language of the foreigners.”

He waited courteously till Hector had taken a seat.

Then, anxiously:

“You have come to—buy a blade, sword or dagger or yataghan?”