Sirocco

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ni. THE ANVIL MESSAGE Duncan was a resourceful man, and Cunningham appearing but a broken reed, he cast about for other means. For a day or two he scouted around the blank walls of the Sultan's palace and gardens without receiving much inspiration. The bribing of some official naturally presented itself to...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ni. THE ANVIL MESSAGE Duncan was a resourceful man, and Cunningham appearing but a broken reed, he cast about for other means. For a day or two he scouted around the blank walls of the Sultan's palace and gardens without receiving much inspiration. The bribing of some official naturally presented itself to his mind, but did not commend itself to him. This would be putting himself and Dalmera Grahame absolutely in the power of some Siroccan with a proved lack of moral principles; and the probability was that after having bled them as much as they could stand, he would betray them to the Sultan for still further rewards. It might become necessary to take this risk if every other way was exhausted, but for the present Duncan exercised his ingenuity to think of some other, cheaper method. For while Duncan had made considerable money, as the result of an adventure among the Anabazis in South America, he had not brought much with him, trusting as he did to subsisting on the lands he passed through. Various plans came to Duncan's mind, all of them risky and impracticable. He thought of tying a note to an arrow and shooting it at night over the building into the garden beyond, on the very minute chance that the English girl and no other would pick it up. Or of leaving a basket of fruit with her name on it at the palace gate, with a letter inserted in an apple, which plan had, among numerous other objections, the one that it would probably alarm the Sultan by showing him that some friend of the girl's was in Kub-hub-nol trying to communicate with her. Finally, after discarding these and other schemes, Duncan evolved one which at least had the merit of venturing little. Out in New Mexico, several years before in Duncan's cowboy days, luck had once been against him so long that h...