Then it was, coming hot-foot after so much sorrow, loss and doubt, that there followed the happiest event of all my life. Utterly tired out and very despondent, I was seated on an arrow-chest awaiting the order to march, idly watching Oliver and Maqueda talking with great earnestness at a little distance, and in the intervals trying to prevent poor Higgs at my side from falling asleep. While I was thus engaged, suddenly I heard a disturbance, and by the bright moonlight caught sight of a man being led into the camp in charge of a guard of Abati soldiers, whom from their dress I knew to belong to a company that just then was employed in watching the lower gates of the pass.
I took no particular heed of the incident, thinking only that they might have captured some spy, till a murmur of astonishment, and the general stir, warned me that something unusual had occurred. So I rose from my box and strolled towards the man, who now was hidden from me by a group of Mountaineers. As I advanced this group opened, the men who composed it bowing to me with a kind of wondering respect that impressed me, I did not know why.
Then for the first time I saw the prisoner. He was a tall, athletic young man, dressed in festal robes with a heavy gold chain about his neck, and I wondered vaguely what such a person should be doing here in this time of national commotion. He turned his head so that the moonlight showed his dark eyes, his somewhat oval-shaped face ending in a peaked black beard, and his finely cut features. In an instant I knew him.
/It was my son Roderick!/
Next moment, for the first time for very many years, he was in my arms.
The first thing that I remember saying to him was a typically Anglo-Saxon remark, for however much we live in the East or elsewhere, we never really shake off our native conventions, and habits of speech.
It was, "How are you, my boy, and how on earth did you come here?" to which he answered, slowly, it is true, and speaking with a foreign accent:
"All right, thank you, father. I ran upon my legs."
By this time Higgs hobbled up, and was greeting my son warmly, for, of course, they were old friends.
"Thought you were to be married to-night, Roderick?" he said.
"Yes, yes," he answered, "I am half married according to Fung custom, which counts not to my soul. Look, this is the dress of marriage," and he pointed to his fine embroidered robe and rich ornaments.
"Then, where's your wife?" asked Higgs.
"I do not know and I do not care," he answered, "for I did not like that wife. Also it is all nothing as I am not quite married to her.
Fung marriage between big people takes two days to finish, and if not finished does not matter. So she marry some one else if she like, and I too."
"What happened then?" I asked.
"Oh, this, father. When we had eaten the marriage feast, but before we past before priest, suddenly we hear a thunder and see a pillar of fire shoot up into sky, and sitting on top of it head of Harmac, which vanish into heaven and stop there. Then everybody jump up and say:
"'Magic of white man! Magic of white man! White man kill the god who sit there from beginning of world, now day of Fung finished according to prophecy. Run away, people of Fung, run away!'
"Barung the Sultan tear his clothes too, and say--'Run away, Fung,' and my half-wife, she tear /her/ clothes and say nothing, but run like antelope. So they all run toward east, where great river is, and leave me alone. Then I get up and run too--toward west, for I know from Black Windows," and he pointed to Higgs, "when we shut up together in belly of god before he let down to lions, what all this game mean, and therefore not frightened. Well, I run, meeting no one in night, till I come to pass, run up it, and find guards, to whom I tell story, so they not kill me, but let me through, and at last I come here, quite safe, without Fung wife, thank God, and that end of tale."
"I am afraid you are wrong there, my boy," I said, "out of the frying-pan into the fire, that's all."
"Out of frying-pan into fire," he repeated. "Not understand; father must remember I only little fellow when Khalifa's people take me, and since then speak no English till I meet Black Windows. Only he give me Bible-book that he have in pocket when he go down to be eat by lions."
(Here Higgs blushed, for no one ever suspected him, a severe critic of all religions, of carrying a Bible in his pocket, and muttered something about "ancient customs of the Hebrews.")
"Well," went on Roderick, "read that book ever since, and, as you see, all my English come back."
"The question is," said Higgs, evidently in haste to talk of something else, "will the Fung come back?"
"Oh! Black Windows, don't know, can't say. Think not. Their prophecy was that Harmac move to Mur, but when they see his head jump into sky and stop there, they run every man toward the sunrise, and I think go on running."
"But Harmac has come to Mur, Roderick," I said; "at least his head has fallen on to the cliff that overlooks the city."
"Oh! my father," he answered, "then that make great difference. When Fung find out that head of Harmac has come here, no doubt they come after him, for head his most holy bit, especially as they want hang all the Abati whom they not like."
"Well, let's hope that they don't find out anything about it," I replied, to change the subject. Then taking Roderick by the hand I led him to where Maqueda stood a yard or two apart, listening to our talk, but, of course, understanding very little of it, and introduced him to her, explaining in a few words the wonderful thing that had happened.
She welcomed him very kindly, and congratulated me upon my son's escape. Meanwhile, Roderick had been staring at her with evident admiration. Now he turned to us and said in his quaint broken English:
"Walda Nagasta most lovely woman! No wonder King Solomon love her mother. If Barung's daughter, my wife, had been like her, think I run through great river into rising sun with Fung."
