Complete El Borak (Pulp Heroes and Villains) Read Free Page B

feringhi did not apply to El Borak.
     
    “Take him!” howled Yusef Khan. “He shall be flayed alive!”
     
    They moved forward at that, and Gordon laughed unpleasantly.
     
    “Torture will not wipe out the shame I have put upon your chief,” he taunted. “Men will say ye are led by a khan who bears the mark of El Borak’s hand in his beard. How is such shame to be wiped out? Lo, he calls on his warriors to avenge him! Is Yusef Khan a coward?”
     
    They hesitated again and looked at their chief whose beard was clotted with foam. They all knew that to wipe out such an insult the aggressor must be slain by the victim in single combat. In that wolf pack even a suspicion of cowardice was tantamount to a death sentence.
     
    If Yusef Khan failed to accept Gordon’s challenge, his men might obey him and torture the American to death at his pleasure, but they would not forget, and from that moment he was doomed.
     
    Yusef Khan knew this; knew that Gordon had tricked him into a personal duel, but he was too drunk with fury to care. His eyes were red as those of a rabid wolf, and he had forgotten his suspicions that Gordon had riflemen hidden up on the ridge. He had forgotten everything except his frenzied passion to wipe out forever the glitter in those savage black eyes that mocked him.
     
    “Dog!” he screamed, ripping out his broad scimitar. “Die at the hands of a chief!”
     
    He came like a typhoon, his cloak whipping out in the wind behind him, his scimitar flaming above his head. Gordon met him in the center of the space the warriors left suddenly clear.
     
    Yusef Khan rode a magnificent horse as if it were part of him, and it was fresh. But Gordon’s mount had rested, and it was well-trained in the game of war. Both horses responded instantly to the will of their riders.
     
    The fighters revolved about each other in swift curvets and gambados, their blades flashing and grating without the slightest pause, turned red by the rising sun. It was less like two men fighting on horseback than like a pair of centaurs, half man and half beast, striking for one another’s life.
     
    “Dog!” panted Yusef Khan, hacking and hewing like a man possessed of devils. “I’ll nail your head to my tent pole--ahhhh!”
     
    Not a dozen of the hundred men watching saw the stroke, except as a dazzling flash of steel before their eyes, but all heard its crunching impact. Yusef Khan’s charger screamed and reared, throwing a dead man from the saddle with a split skull.
     
    A wordless wolfish yell that was neither anger nor applause went up, and Gordon wheeled, whirling his scimitar about his head so that the red drops flew in a shower.
     
    “Yusef Khan is dead!” he roared. “Is there one to take up his quarrel?”
     
    They gaped at him, not sure of his intention, and before they could recover from the surprise of seeing their invincible chief fall, Gordon thrust his scimitar back in its sheath with a certain air of finality and said:
     
    “And now who will follow me to plunder greater than any of ye ever dreamed?”
     
    That struck an instant spark, but their eagerness was qualified by suspicion.
     
    “Show us!” demanded one. “Show us the plunder before we slay thee.”
     
    Without answering, Gordon swung off his horse and cast the reins to a mustached rider to hold, who was so astonished that he accepted the indignity without protest. Gordon strode over to a cooking pot, squatted beside it and began to eat ravenously. He had not tasted food in many hours.
     
    “Shall I show you the stars by daylight?” he demanded, scooping out handfuls of stewed mutton, “Yet the stars are there, and men see them in the proper time. If I had the loot would I come asking you to share it? Neither of us can win it without the other’s aid.”
     
    “He lies,” said one whom his comrades addressed as Uzun Beg. “Let us slay him and continue to follow the caravan we have been tracking.”
     
    “Who will lead you?”