Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/282

 revolver, half drew it from his pocket, and waited. And while waiting the man looked about him, and knew that he was, to all intents and purposes, lost; in the moonlight, at least, the street in which he stood was totally unknown to him.

For some minutes he waited, with a growing impatience. The night lay about him beautiful and very quiet; far in the distance the faint jangle of some native stringed instrument stirred upon the breeze; and, farther yet, a pariah dog lifted his nose to heaven and poured out his soul's sorrow to the sympathetic moon; whereupon all his friends, neighbors, and relations in Cairo joined their wails of anguish unto his.

O'Rourke stood wrapped in the illusions of his imagination, fancying that the moon's rays, falling upon a distant wall of white, were like the glowing pallor of his goddess of the night; that the stark, black shadow of a far doorway, with a dim glimmer of reddish light from a native lamp in its center, was as the shadowed glory of madame's eyes …

A touch upon his, arm made him wheel sharply about, alert, to find the Nubian by his side; he nerved himself against the slightest alarm and followed.

In a moment he had crossed a threshold, to stand in a room of Stygian darkness. A door was closed and bolted behind him. In another, the slave had caught him by the hand and drawn him forward—while he yielded with a strange reluctance. And in a third instant he had stumbled up a short, steep, narrow flight of stairs, passing through a second doorway; where the Nubian deserted him, stepping back and shutting the door softly.

The Irishman stood still, for a passing second somewhat confused—at a loss to imagine what would come next upon the program of this adventure that (he was thinking) might