Chapter XLII: The Naya Haye

“If your friend does not come soon, gentlemen, I shall have to cut the country, even at the risk of losing your society. The Khamsin is getting to be more than I can bear,” Oswald Ferris said one night, as they lingered under the palm trees that skirted the camp that was pitched near the shores of the Nile in Upper Egypt.

The dozen men who composed the party were disposed in various picturesque attitudes about the camp. The sport of the day had been fishing, and several were collected around a huge fire preparing supper, the air being highly impregnated with the odor of broiling fish. The clear soft moonlight and starlight glimmered down upon the animated scene, upon the stalwart forms and handsome faces of the men who were laughing and jesting in high enjoyment of the scene and the hour, unmindful of the grave, preoccupied faces of the two Americans whom they had become habituated to regard as deaths heads at the feast.

Leaning lightly against a stately palm tree gazing in the brilliant moonlight at the lotus lillies rocking on the breast of the storied Nile, was Talbot Strangemore. He had been thinking sadly of his beautiful dead bride, but at those words from Oswald Ferris he turned his head and looked at him.

Khamsin--the hot wind from the desert--had been blowing several weeks now, and as Ferris said, it was hard to bear. It was oppressive and unhealthy in the extreme, and every one began to chafe at the delay. The sweltering days and nights made them hot and impatient, but until now no one had spoken out his discontent.

The chief laughed good-naturedly at the complaint of Ferris.

“You are right, Ferris. The Khamsin is hard to bear,” he said. “One seems to scorch and shrivel in the intense heat. I cannot imagine what detains John Armstrong so long. We expected he would have joined us several weeks ago. If he does not put in an appearance by to-morrow, I think we shall have to give him up and cut the country as you say. We cannot remain but a short while longer any-way, for it will soon be the season for the annual inundation of the country by the over-flow of the Nile.”

“You cannot get away too soon to please me!” growled Ferris. And the good-natured Wilson said again, “We will wait until to-morrow anyway,” and dropped the subject.

It was late when they retired that night, and before any one had closed his eyes in sleep a piercing cry of horror startled the camp.

In an instant every man had sprung from his rude camp-bed to the ground.

“What is it?” they began to exclaim, and some one answered, quickly:

“It was Strangemore that shouted. Let us see what ails him.”

Pale as a ghost and shivering with horror, Talbot was standing by his couch holding one end of the coverlet clutched in his hand. He turned his burning eyes upon them.

“There was an asp in my bed--see!” he said, hoarsely.

And there, sure enough, upon the white bed lay the famed serpent that brought welcome death to beauteous, conquered Cleopatra--but this one was dead--slain in all its deadly power by a heavy blunt instrument that Talbot still held mechanically in his hand.

“Great God, how did it come there?” Wilson cried, excitedly, and then he suddenly saw a small, strong wooden box protruding from the pillow. He snatched it hurriedly out.

“Why this is my own box,” he said. “The box where I had placed a specimen of the deadly asp, _naya haye_, in order to take it to a museum in England. It is empty. A hole has been drilled in the side and lightly covered with thin pasteboard through which the serpent has made its way. Great heavens, it looks like a premeditated deed! What does it mean, Strangemore?”

“Some one has tried to kill me,” Talbot answered, hoarsely. “When I threw back the cover the asp lay coiled in my bed. Fortunately the moonlight was so clear and brilliant that I distinguished the horrible serpent and quickly snatched up this heavy bolt and dispatched him.”

He was shuddering with horror. The shock to his nerves had been great, and his eyes gleamed wildly out of his marble white features as he looked around upon their horror-struck faces. He saw that only one was missing.

Suddenly Wilson exclaimed:

“Ferris was looking at the asp in the box this evening. Where is he now?”

They found him lying quietly in bed and apparently asleep. The men shook him roughly.

“He must be dead or he could not have slept through the uproar we have made,” they said.

But at their rough handling he started, broad awake, sat up in bed, and gazed at them in a dull, dazed way.

“What is it? Why have you wakened me? Has anything happened?” he stammered.

Wilson took him firmly by the shoulder.

“Yes, something has happened,” he said, sharply. “Ferris, you were looking at the asp in the box this evening. What did you do with it?”

Ferris looked at him in wonder.

“I did nothing with it. I was merely peering through the glass top at your dangerous pet, and I came away and left it under the great rock where you always keep it. Has it gotten away from you?” he asked.

“Yes,” Wilson answered.

“Well, I always told you it would, you know, and I am glad it has done so at last without harming any one, as I always had the most horrible fears that it would do.”

“But the strangest part of it all was, that when it made its marvelous escape it carried my box with it,” said Wilson, drily.

“No,” exclaimed Oswald Ferris.

“Yes, and the strangest part of it yet was that the asp, box and all, went and hid under the pillow of Talbot Strangemore, your friend. And this same cunning serpent of old Nile cut a hole in the side of the box which he covered with thin paste-board in order to make his exit easy at the right moment.”

In the brilliant moonlight that flooded the scene with radiance he saw the men’s faces gazing at him with dark threatening looks that made the blood run coldly through his veins.

He gave a gasp and a shiver and tried to brave it out.

“You are jesting with me, surely, and it is an unseemly hour for pleasantries,” he said, in a tone bristling with offense. “Have you wakened me from sleep at midnight to tell me this ridiculous tale?”

Wilson gave him a glance of flashing contempt. The men crowded closely around him, casting scornful looks upon Ferris, while Wilson, who seemed to have constituted himself the spokesman, said, sarcastically:

“Is there anything ridiculous in the fact that Strangemore found that horrible poisonous serpent coiled in his bed when he was about to retire?”

“In his bed, oh, horrible! Then poor Strangemore must be dead,” Ferris exclaimed, in well simulated distress and horror, but with a wild throb of gladness and relief at his heart.

No one said yea or nay at his words, but Wilson continued, sternly:

“I am forced to believe that you, Ferris, placed that serpent in Strangemore’s bed with murderous intent, although you have pretended to be his friend. We have watched you two Americans, I and my comrades, and we know that you two are linked together by some mysterious bond, and that you mutually hate each other. Is it not so, my men?”

“Aye! Aye! Aye!” rang shrilly on the hot sweltering air of the June night.

“I know that you took away the box with the asp this evening,” Wilson went on, “I said nothing for I believed that you had done it for a mere joke to alarm me over the loss of my deadly pet. But this horrible _eclaircissement_ to-night has taught me better. You deliberately laid your plans for the death of Talbot Strangemore, whom you both hate and fear for some unexplained cause. Do you dare deny your murderous attempt?”

“I dare deny it because I am innocent. I had no cause of quarrel with Strangemore. He was my friend,” asserted Ferris boldly, yet inwardly quaking with fear.

“You are a liar!” Wilson cried stormily, and one after another the voices of the men caught it up and the fierce accusation rang out upon the air.

Someone ran and brought Strangemore and placed them face to face. The would-be murderer recoiled with a cry of fear when he beheld his living foe.

“Strangemore, I thought you dead!” he exclaimed, and the other answered, with limitless contempt:

“It is not your fault that I am alive!”

“Speak, Strangemore,” cried the leader. “Do you believe that this coward and villain quaking here, placed that serpent in your bed with the deliberate intention of destroying you?”

There was a moment of the deepest, most intense silence, and then Talbot Strangemore lifting his hand solemnly to heaven, answered firmly:

“Before God I believe it.”

“That is enough,” said the spokesman, and he turned back to Ferris who had broken into fierce denials and imprecations.

“Listen,” he said. “In your own land they have a terrible and summary method of punishing offenders such as you are--men guilty of the blackest treason and iniquity. I confess that in your case I could contemplate that method with unalloyed satisfaction. I see no reason why we foreigners here under the distant skies of Egypt should not have recourse to American methods to punish this native of a land which he has dishonored. My comrades, what say you? Shall we not resolve ourselves into a court of Judge Lynch?”

“Aye, aye,” the answer rang loudly, with but two dissenting voices, and those two the would-be murderer’s and his noble victim. But in the next moment the exciting scene came to an abrupt pause by a sudden interruption.

“Ho, ho, ho!” rang two blended voices, startling the actors in the drama being played, and looking quickly around they confronted two strong men who had stolen unobserved upon them.

“What, John Armstrong and his servant!” they cried, and forgetting Ferris and his sin for a moment, they gathered around the new comer plying him with eager questions.

Oswald Ferris drew a long breath of relief and crouched upon the ground by the side of the camp-bed, hoping that the coming of the long expected Armstrong would turn the thoughts of his stern judges in some more kindly direction.

He knew that it would be worse than useless to endeavor to escape, and cursing his evil luck, he waited in dead silence, and with the cold dew of terror beading his brow, for the finale of his attempted crime.

“Curse me, what a bungler I was,” he said, “I was sure that the serpent would do its deadly work surely, and then I would have removed the tell-tale box and with it all trace of my crime. Fate has played me a cursed trick, and I shall most probably pay the penalty of my mistake with my life. So, Sibyl, you will be avenged after all, and my vengeance upon you will have been the primal cause of my own death.”

It was horrible sitting there so still under the burning stars of Egypt and looking death in the face. Oh how he cursed the memory of the woman who through love had brought all this awful doom upon him. It was most unfortunate that the light coquette had ever crossed his path. His passionate, intense nature, fierce and jealous to the last degree had staked everything upon her, and the loss of her had made him a fiend. Everything good and noble had seemed to die within him. Like the hot Khamsin as it swept across the desert plains blighting and burning everything in its destructive course, so incurable despair had burned away everything that had been noble within him.