O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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Najib's solid face went blank. Here at last was an argument that struck
home. He had known Kirby for years, long enough to know that the
American was most emphatically a man of his word. If Kirby swore he
would not act as the men's intermediary with the company, then
decisively Kirby would keep his oath. And Najib realized the futility of
getting any one else to write such a letter in any language which the
Cabell Smelting Company's home office would decipher.

He peered up at Kirby with disconsolate astonishment. Quick to take
advantage of the change, the manager hurried on:

"Now, the men are on strike. That's understood. Well what are you and
they going to do about it? When the draft for the monthly pay roll comes
to the bank, at Jerusalem as usual, I shall refuse to indorse it. I give
you my oath on that, too. I am not going to distribute the company's
cash among a bunch of strikers. Without my signature, the bank won't
cash the draft. You know that. Well, how are you going to live, all of
you, on nothing a month? When the present stock of provisions gives out
I'm not going to order them renewed. And the provision people in
Jerusalem won't honour any one's order for them but mine. This is the
only concern in Syria to-day that pays within forty per cent, of the
wages you chaps are getting. With no pay and no food you're due to find
your strike rather costly. For when the mine shuts down I'm going back
to America. There'll be nothing to keep me here. I'll be ruined, in any
case. You people will find yourself without money or provisions. And if
you go elsewhere for work it will be at a pay that is only a little more
than half what you are getting now. Your lookout isn't cheery, my
striking friend!"

He made as though to go into his tent. After a brief pause of horror,
Najib pattered hurriedly and beseechingly in his wake.

"Howadji!" pleaded the Syrian shakily. _"Howadji!_ You would not, in the
untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that? Not _me_, at anyhow?
Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old! You
would not forsook me, to starve myself! _Aie! Ohe!_"

"Shut up that ungodly racket!" snapped Kirby, entering his tent and
lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional
mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib's wide-flung jaws.
"Shut up! You'll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to
howling! It's bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the
rest of the mess."

"But, howadji!" pleaded Najib.

_"Taman!"_ growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic
word for the ending of all interviews.

"But I shall be beruinated, howadji!" tearfully insisted Najib.

Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make
ready for bed. If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a
conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then
the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare
intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of
persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

This was Kirby's sole hope. And he knew it. Unless the fellaheen could
be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should
break the mine as well as the mine's manager. Kirby knew of no way to
persuade the men. The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean
nothing to them. All their brains could master at one time, without the
aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double
pay and half labour.

A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in
the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby. In one hour his
golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed. At best
he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to
save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of
their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments
to the point of sabotage.

The more he thought of it, the less possible did it seem to Kirby that
Najib could undo the damage he had so blithely done. Ordering the
blubbering little fellow out of the tent and refusing to speak or listen
further, Kirby went to bed.

Oddly enough, he slept. There was nothing to worry about. When a man's
job or fortune are imperilled sleep vanishes. But after the catastrophe
what sense is there in lying awake? Depression and nervous fatigue threw
Kirby into a troubled slumber. Only once in the night was he roused.

Perhaps two hours before dawn he started up at sound of a humble
scratching at the open door flap of his tent. On the threshold cowered
Najib.

"Furthermore, howadji," came the Syrian's woe-begone voice through the
gloom, "could I borrow me a book if I shall use it with much
carefulness?"

Too drowsy to heed the absurdity of such a plea at such an hour, Kirby
grumbled a surly assent, and dozed again as he heard Najib rumbling, in
the dark, among the shelves of the packing-box bookcase in a far corner
of the tent. Here were stored nearly a hundred old volumes which had
once been a part of the missionary library belonging to Kirby's father
at Nablous. A few years earlier, at the moving of the mission, the dead
missionary's scanty library had been shipped across country to his son.

Kirby awoke at greyest daylight. Through force of habit he woke at this
hour; in spite of the workless day which he knew confronted him. It was
his custom to get up and take his bath in the rain cistern at this time,
and to finish dressing just as the men piled out for the morning's work.

Yet now the first sounds that smote his ears as he opened his eyes were
the rhythmic creak of the mine windlass and equally rhythmic, if less
tuneful, chant of the men who were working it;

_"All-ah sa-eed!--Ne-bi sa-eed! Ohe! Sa-eed! Sa-eed! Sa-EED!"_

In the distance, dying away, he heard the plodding hoofs of a string of
pack mules. From the direction of the mine came the hoodlum racket which
betokens, in Syria, the efforts of a number of honest labourers to
perform their daily tasks in an efficient and orderly way.

Kirby, in sleepy amaze, looked at his watch in the dim dawn light. He
saw it was still a full half hour before the men were due to begin work.
And by the sounds he judged that the day's labour was evidently well
under way. Yes, and to-day there was to have been no work done!

Kirby jumped out of bed and strode dazedly to his tent door. At the mine
below him his fellaheen were as busy as so many dirty and gaudy bees.
Even the lordly lazy Turkish soldiers were lending a hand at windlass
and crane. Over the nick of the pass, leading toward Jerusalem, the last
animal of a mule train was vanishing. Najib, who had as usual escorted
the departing shipment of ore to the opening in the pass, was trotting
back toward camp.

At sight of Kirby in the tent door the little superintendent veered from
his course toward the mine and increased his pace to a run as he bore
down upon the American. Najib's swart face was aglow. But his eyes were
those of a man who has neglected to sleep. His cheeks still bore flecks
of the dust he had thrown on his head when Kirby had explained the wreck
of his scheme and of his future. There, in all likelihood, the dust
smears would remain until the next rain should wash them off. But,
beyond these tokens of recent mental strife, Najib's visage shone like
a full moon that is streaked by dun dust clouds.

"Furthermore, howadji!" he hailed his chief as soon as he was within
earshot, "the shipment for Alexandretta is on its wayward--over than an
hour earlier than it was due to bestart itself. And those poor
hell-selected fellaheen are betoiling themselfs grand. Have I done well,
oh, howadji?"

"Najib!" stammered Kirby, still dazed.

"And here is that most sweet book of great worthiness and wit, which I
borrowed me of you in the night, howadji," pursued Najib, taking from
the soiled folds of his abieh a large old volume, bound in stout
leather, after the manner of religious or scientific books of a
half-century ago. On the brown back a scratched gold lettering
proclaimed the gruesome title:

"Martyrs of Ancient and Modern Error."

Well did Kirby know the tome. Hundreds of times, as a child, had he sat
on the stone floor of his father's cell-like mission study at Nablous,
and had pored in shuddering fascination over its highly coloured
illustrations. The book was a compilation--chiefly in the form of
multichrome pictures with accompanying borders of text--of all the
grisly scenes of martyrdom which the publishers had been able to scrape
together from such classics as "Fox's Book of Martyrs" and the like.
Twice this past year he had surprised Najib scanning the gruesome pages
in frank delight.

"I betook the book to their campfire, howadji, and I smote upon my
breast and I bewept me and I wailed aloud and I would not make comfort.
Till at last they all awoken and they came out of their huts and they
reviled at me for disturbing them as they slept themselfs so happily.
Then I spake much to them. And all the time I teared with my eyes and
moaned aloudly.

"But," put in Kirby, "I don't see what this--"

"In a presently you shall, howadji. Yesterday I begot your goat. To-day
I shall make you to frisk with peacefulness of heart. Those fellaheen
cannot read. They are not of an education, as I am. And they know my
wiseness in reading. For over than a trillion times I have told them.
And they believe. Pictures also they believe. Just as men of an
education believe the printed word; knowing full well it could not be
printed if it were not Allah's own truth. Well, these folk believe a
picture, if it be in a book. So I showed them pictures. And I read the
law which was beneath the pictures. They heard me read. And they saw the
pictures with their own eyesight. So what could they do but believe? And
they did. Behold, howadji!"

Opening the volume with respectful care, Najib thumbed the yellowing
pages. Presently he paused at a picture which represented in glaring
detail a stricken battlefield strewn with dead and dying Orientals of
vivid costume. In the middle distance a regiment of prisoners was being
slaughtered in a singularly bloodthirsty fashion. The caption, above the
cut, read:

_"Destruction of Sennacherib's Assyrian Hosts, by the People of
Israel."_

"While yet they gazed joyingly on this noble picture," remarked Najib,
"I read to them the words of the law about it. I read aloudly, thus:
'This shall be the way of punishing all folk who make strike hereafter
this date.' Then," continued Najib, "I showed to them another pretty and
splendid picture. See!"

_"Martyrdom of John Rogers, His Wife and Their Nine Children."_

"And," proclaimed Najib, "of this sweet portrait I read thus the law:
'So shall the wifes and the offsprungs of all strike-makers be put to
death; and those wicked strike-makers themselfs along with them.' By the
time I had shown them six or fifteen of such pictures and read them the
law for each of them, those miserable fellaheen and guards were
beweeping themselfs harder and louder and sadder than I had seemed to.
Why, howadji, it was with a difficultness that I kept them from running
away and enhiding themselfs in the mountains, lest the soldiers of the
pasha come upon them at once and punish them for trying to make strike!
But I said I would intercede with you to make you merciful of heart
toward them, to spare them and not to tell the law what they had so
sinsomely planned to do I said I would do this, for mine own sake as
well as for theirs, and that I knew I could wake you to pity. But I said
it would perchancely soften your heart toward them, if all should work
harder to atone themselfs for the sin they had beplotted. Wherefore,
howadji, they would consent to sleep no more; but they ran henceforthly
and at once to the mine. They have been onto the job ever since. And,
howadji, they are jobbing harder than ever I have seen men bejob
themselfs. Am I forgiven, howadji?" he finished timidly.

"Forgiven!" yelled Kirby, when he could speak. "Why, you eternal little
liar, you're a genius! My hat is off to you! This ought to be worth a
fifty-mejidie bonus. And--"

"Instead of the bonus, howadji," ventured Najib, scared at his own
audacity, yet seeking to take full advantage of this moment of
expansiveness, "could I have this pleasing book as a baksheesh gift?"

"Take it!" vouchsafed Kirby. "The thing gives me bad dreams. Take it!"

"May the houris make soft your bed in the Paradise of the Prophet!"
jabbered Najib, in a frenzy of gratitude, as he hugged the treasured
gift to his breast. "And--and, howadji, there be more pictures I did not
show. They will be of a nice convenience, if ever again it be needsome
to make a new law for the mine."

"But--"

"Oh, happy and pretty decent hour!" chortled the little man, petting his
beloved volume as if it were a loved child and executing a shuffling and
improvised step-dance of unalloyed rapture. "This book has been
donationed to me because I was brave enough to request for it while yet
your heart was warm at me, howadji. It is even as your sainted feringhee
proverb says: 'Never put off till to-morrow the--the--man who may be
done, to-day!'"

THE ELEPHANT REMEMBERS

By EDISON MARSHALL

From _Everybody's Magazine_

An elephant is old on the day he is born, say the natives of Burma, and
no white man is ever quite sure just what they mean. Perhaps they refer
to his pink, old-gentleman's skin and his droll, fumbling, old-man ways
and his squeaking treble voice. And maybe they mean he is born with a
wisdom such as usually belongs only to age. And it is true that if any
animal in the world has had a chance to acquire knowledge it is the
elephant, for his breed are the oldest residents of this old world.

They are so old that they don't seem to belong to the twentieth century
at all. Their long trunks, their huge shapes, all seem part of the
remote past. They are just the remnants of a breed that once was great.

Long and long ago, when the world was very young indeed, when the
mountains were new, and before the descent of the great glaciers taught
the meaning of cold, they were the rulers of the earth, but they have
been conquered in the struggle for existence. Their great cousins, the
mastodon and the mammoth, are completely gone, and their own tribe can
now be numbered by thousands.

But because they have been so long upon the earth, because they have
wealth of experience beyond all other creatures, they seem like
venerable sages in a world of children. They are like the last veterans
of an old war, who can remember scenes and faces that all others have
forgotten.

Far in a remote section of British India, in a strange, wild province
called Burma, Muztagh was born. And although he was born in captivity,
the property of a mahout, in his first hour he heard the far-off call
of the wild elephants in the jungle.

The Burmans, just like the other people of India, always watch the first
hour of a baby's life very closely. They know that always some incident
will occur that will point, as a weather-vane points in the wind, to the
baby's future. Often they have to call a man versed in magic to
interpret, but sometimes the prophecy is quite self-evident. No one
knows whether or not it works the same with baby elephants, but
certainly this wild, far-carrying call, not to be imitated by any living
voice, did seem a token and an omen in the life of Muztagh. And it is a
curious fact that the little baby lifted his ears at the sound and
rocked back and forth on his pillar legs.

Of all the places in the great world, only a few remain wherein a
captive elephant hears the call of his wild brethren at birth. Muztagh's
birthplace lies around the corner of the Bay of Bengal, not far from the
watershed of the Irawadi, almost north of Java. It is strange and wild
and dark beyond the power of words to tell. There are great dark
forests, unknown, slow-moving rivers, and jungles silent and dark and
impenetrable.

Little Muztagh weighed a flat two hundred pounds at birth. But this was
not the queerest thing about him. Elephant babies, although usually
weighing not more than one hundred and eighty, often touch two hundred.
The queerest thing was a peculiarity that probably was completely
overlooked by his mother. If she saw it out of her dull eyes, she took
no notice of it. It was not definitely discovered until the mahout came
out of his hut with a lighted fagot for a first inspection.

He had been wakened by the sound of the mother's pain. "_Hai!_" he had
exclaimed to his wife. "Who has ever heard a cow bawl so loud in labour?
The little one that to-morrow you will see beneath her belly must weigh
more than you!"

This was rather a compliment to his plump wife. She was not offended at
all. Burman women love to be well-rounded. But the mahout was not
weighing the effect of his words. He was busy lighting his firebrand,
and his features seemed sharp and intent when the beams came out. Rather
he was already weighing the profits of little Muztagh. He was an
elephant-catcher by trade, in the employ of the great white Dugan Sahib,
and the cow that was at this moment bringing a son into the world was
his own property. If the baby should be of the Kumiria--

The mahout knew elephants from head to tail, and he was very well
acquainted with the three grades that compose the breed. The least
valuable of all are the Mierga--a light, small-headed, thin-skinned,
weak-trunked and unintelligent variety that are often found in the best
elephant herds. They are often born of the most noble parents, and they
are as big a problem to elephant men as razor-backs to hog-breeders.
Then there is a second variety, the Dwasala, that compose the great bulk
of the herd--a good, substantial, strong, intelligent grade of elephant.
But the Kumiria is the best of all; and when one is born in a captive
herd it is a time for rejoicing. He is the perfect elephant--heavy,
symmetrical, trustworthy and fearless--fitted for the pageantry of
kings.

He hurried out to the lines, for now he knew that the baby was born. The
mother's cries had ceased. The jungle, dark and savage beyond ever the
power of man to tame, lay just beyond. He could feel its heavy air, its
smells; its silence was an essence. And as he stood, lifting the fagot
high, he heard the wild elephants trumpeting from the hills.

He turned his head in amazement. A Burman, and particularly one who
chases the wild elephants in their jungles, is intensely superstitious,
and for an instant it seemed to him that the wild trumpeting must have
some secret meaning, it was so loud and triumphant and prolonged. It was
greatly like the far-famed elephant salute--ever one of the mysteries of
those most mysterious of animals--that the great creatures utter at
certain occasions and times.

"Are you saluting this little one?" he cried. "He is not a wild tusker
like you. He is not a wild pig of the jungle. He is born in bonds, such
as you will wear too, after the next drive!"

They trumpeted again, as if in scorn of his words. Their great strength
was given them to rule the jungle, not to haul logs and pull chains! The
man turned back to the lines and lifted higher his light.

Yes--the little elephant in the light-glow was of the Kumiria. Never had
there been a more perfect calf. The light of greed sprang again in his
eyes. And as he held the fagot nearer so that the beams played in the
elephant's eyes and on his coat, the mahout sat down and was still, lest
the gods observe his good luck, and, being jealous, turn it into evil.

The coat was not pinky dark, as is usual in baby elephants. It was
distinctly light-coloured--only a few degrees darker than white.

The man understood at once. In the elephants, as well as in all other
breeds, an albino is sometimes born. A perfectly white elephant, up to a
few years ago, had never been seen, but on rare occasions elephants are
born with light-coloured or clouded hides. Such creatures are bought at
fabulous prices by the Malay and Siamese princes, to whom a white
elephant is the greatest treasure that a king can possess.

Muztagh was a long way from being an albino, yet a tendency in that
direction had bleached his hide. And the man knew that on the morrow
Dugan Sahib would pay him a lifetime's earnings for the little wabbly
calf, whose welcome had been the wild cries of the tuskers in the
jungle.

II

Little Muztagh (which means White Mountain in an ancient tongue) did not
enjoy his babyhood at all. He was born with the memory of jungle
kingdoms, and the life in the elephant lines almost killed him with
dulness.

There was never anything to do but nurse of the strong elephant milk and
roam about in the _keddah_ or along the lines. He had been bought the
second day of his life by Dugan Sahib, and the great white heaven-born
saw to it that he underwent none of the risks that are the happy fate
of most baby elephants. His mother was not taken on the elephant drives
into the jungles, so he never got a taste of this exciting sport. Mostly
she was kept chained in the lines, and every day Langur Dass, the
low-caste hillman in Dugan's employ, grubbed grass for her in the
valleys. All night long, except the regular four hours of sleep, he
would hear her grumble and rumble and mutter discontent that her little
son shared with her.

Muztagh's second year was little better. Of course he had reached the
age where he could eat such dainties as grass and young sugar-cane, but
these things could not make up for the fun he was missing in the hills.
He would stand long hours watching their purple tops against the skies,
and his little dark eyes would glow. He would see the storms break and
flash above them, behold the rains lash down through the jungles, and he
was always filled with strange longings and desires that he was too
young to understand or to follow. He would see the white haze steam up
from the labyrinth of wet vines, and he would tingle and scratch for the
feel of its wetness on his skin. And often, when the mysterious Burman
night came down, it seemed to him that he would go mad. He would hear
the wild tuskers trumpeting in the jungles a very long way off, and all
the myriad noises of the mysterious night, and at such times even his
mother looked at him with wonder.

"Oh, little restless one," Langur Dass would say, "thou and that old cow
thy mother and I have one heart between us. We know the burning--we
understand, we three!"

It was true that Langur Dass understood more of the ways of the forest
people than any other hillman in the encampment. But his caste was low,
and he was drunken and careless and lazy beyond words, and the hunters
had mostly only scorn for him. They called him Langur after a
grey-bearded breed of monkeys along the slopes of the Himalayas, rather
suspecting he was cursed with evil spirits, for why should any sane man
have such mad ideas as to the rights of elephants? He never wanted to
join in the drives--which was a strange thing indeed for a man raised in
the hills. Perhaps he was afraid--but yet they could remember a certain
day in the bamboo thickets, when a great, wild buffalo had charged their
camp and Langur Dass acted as if fear were something he had never heard
of and knew nothing whatever about.

One day they asked him about it. "Tell us, Langur Dass," they asked,
mocking the ragged, dejected looking creature, "If thy name speaks
truth, thou art brother to many monkey-folk, and who knows the jungle
better than thou or they? None but the monkey-folk and thou canst talk
with my lord the elephant. _Hai!_ We have seen thee do it, Langur Dass.
How is it that when we go hunting, thou art afraid to come?"

Langur looked at them out of his dull eyes, and evaded their question
just as long as he could. "Have you forgotten the tales you heard on
your mothers' breasts?" he asked at last. "Elephants are of the jungle.
You are of the cooking-pots and thatch! How should such folk as ye are
understand?"

This was flat heresy from their viewpoint. There is an old legend among
the elephant-catchers to the effect that at one time men were subject to
the elephants.

Yet mostly the elephants that these men knew were patient and contented
in their bonds. Mostly they loved their mahouts, gave their strong backs
willingly to toil, and were always glad and ready to join in the chase
after others of their breed. Only on certain nights of the year, when
the tuskers called from the jungles, and the spirit of the wild was
abroad, would their love of liberty return to them. But to all this
little Muztagh was distinctly an exception. Even though he had been born
in captivity, his desire for liberty was with him just as constantly as
his trunk or his ears.

He had no love for the mahout that rode his mother. He took little
interest in the little brown boys and girls that played before his
stall. He would stand and look over their heads into the wild, dark
heart of the jungle that no man can ever quite understand. And being
only a beast, he did not know anything about the caste and prejudices
of the men he saw, but he did know that one of them, the low-caste
Langur Dass, ragged and dirty and despised, wakened a responsive chord
in his lonely heart.

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