El Borak and Other Desert Adventures Read Online Free PDF Page A

invisible. In the pitch-black shadow of an overhanging cliff, he suddenly sensed a human presence ahead of him. A voice hissed, a European tongue framing the Turki words: “Ali! Is that you? Is the dog dead? Why did you not call me?”
    Gordon struck savagely in the direction of the voice. His pistol barrel crunched glancingly against a human skull, and a man groaned and crumpled. All about rose a sudden clamor of voices, the rasp of leather on rock. A stentorian voice began shouting, with a note of panic.
    Gordon cast stealth to the winds. With a bound he cleared the writhing body before him, and sped off down the slope. Behind him rose a chorus of yells as the men in hiding glimpsed his shadowy figure racing through the starlight. Jets of orange cut the darkness, but the bullets whined high and wide. Gordon’s flying shape was sighted but an instant, then the shadowygulfs of the night swallowed it up. His enemies raved like foiled wolves in their bewildered rage. Once again their prey had slipped like an eel through their fingers and was gone.
    So thought Gordon as he raced across the plateau beyond the clustering cliffs. They would be hot after him, with hillmen who could trail a wolf across naked rocks, but with the start he had — even with the thought the earth gaped blackly before him. Even his steel-trap quickness could not save him. His grasping hands caught only thin air as he plunged downward, to strike his head with stunning force at the bottom.
    When he regained his senses a chill dawn was whitening the sky. He sat up groggily and felt his head, where a large lump was clotted with dried blood. It was only by chance that his neck was not broken. He had fallen into a ravine, and during the precious time he should have employed in flight, he was lying senseless among the rocks at the bottom.
    Again he felt for the packet under his native shirt, though he knew it was fastened there securely. Those papers were his death-warrant, which only his skill and wit could prevent being executed. Men had laughed when Francis Xavier Gordon had warned them that the devil’s own stew was bubbling in Central Asia, where a satanic adventurer was dreaming of an outlaw empire.
    To prove his assertion, Gordon had gone into Turkistan, in the guise of a wandering Afghan. Years spent in the Orient had given him the ability to pass himself for a native anywhere. He had secured proof no one could ignore or deny, but he had been recognized at last. He had fled for his life, and for more than his life, then, and Hunyadi, the renegade who plotted the destruction of nations, was hot on his heels, clear across the steppes, through the foothills, and up into the mountains where Gordon had thought at last to throw him off. But he had failed. The Hungarian was a human bloodhound. Wary, too, as shown by his sending his craftiest slayer in to strike a blow in the dark.
    Gordon found his rifle and began the climb out of the ravine. Under his left arm was proof that would make certain officials wake up and take steps to prevent the atrocious thing that Gustav Hunyadi planned. It was letters to various Central Asian chiefs, signed and sealed with the Hungarian’s own hand, and it revealed his whole plot to embroil Central Asia in a religious war and send howling hordes of fanatics against the Indian border. It was a plan for plundering on a staggering scale. That package
must
reach Fort Ali Masjid! With all his iron will Francis Xavier Gordon was determined it should; with equal resolution Gustav Hunyadi was determined it should not. In the clash of two such steely temperaments, kingdoms shake and Death reaps a red harvest.
    Dirt crumbled and pebbles rattled down as Gordon worked his way up the sloping side of the ravine, but presently he clambered over the edge and cast a quick look about him. He was on a narrow plateau, pitched among giantslopes which rose somberly above it. To the south showed the mouth of a narrow gorge, walled by rocky cliffs.