The Harold Lamb Megapack by Harold Lamb

Author:Harold Lamb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, crusades, turks, arabs, historical
ISBN: 9781479402823
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2014-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

THE MAKE-WEIGHT (1921)

Arthur Kent breathed a sigh of relief as the last trick of the last hand was turned. He had been lucky. Indeed lucky, if neither of the other two players at the green-covered table in the billiard room of the officers’ club had seen him cheat that last hand.

Checking up the score, Kent held it out for the others to see. His dark eyes were half closed, his full, handsome face impassive. The moisture around his eyes came only from the early evening heat that enveloped Rawal Pindi, in Upper India.

“’Fraid I’m winner, gentlemen. Sorry Captain Gerald has had enough.”

The third man, a nervous subaltern, tried to smile as he wrote out an I.O.U. for seventy pounds. With a nod, Kent folded the sheet of paper on the table and fell to shuffling the cards together until the subaltern had left the room.

Into the pack of cards he deftly slipped the three discards that he had secreted. He smiled, for now there would be no proving that he had cheated. Luck usually ran his way. His was a clever mind and quick to seize advantage—consequently he had made a name as political agent. True, two years ago when native under-officials had complained of extortion, Kent had been transferred from a Bengal province to the small frontier post of Dalgai, near Rawal Pindi. But here he had married a first-rate American girl with a little money.

“Well?” he observed.

Captain Fred Gerald, surgeon, attached to the cavalry regiment at Dalgai—called Daktar Sahib by the natives to whom he sometimes administered aid—took a five-pound bank-note from the breast pocket of his tunic and thrust it across the table. “I’m riding up into the gorges to attend a patient.” His gray eyes hardened swiftly. “Wouldn’t you better return that—paper to the young cub, and explain that a mistake was made in the score?”

“Eh?” Kent flushed as he grasped the other’s meaning. “Kindly explain what the devil you’re getting at?”

The Daktar Sahib counted off on his fingers “Three cards. You palmed them, you know.”

A curious smile played under Kent’s mustache. So he had been seen! And by the one man in the world who did not want to denounce him publicly as a card cheat. His luck was still good. He called to the one house boy who lingered near the window lattice by the table and sent him to fetch Gerald’s stick and pith helmet.

When the two were alone Kent pocketed the promissory note.

“What do you propose to do about it, my dear fellow,” he asked, a strained note in his full voice, “make a fuss or keep quiet?”

Gerald took his hat and stick from the boy who had returned, dismissed the native and rose. His alert, tanned face was emotionless. No one in the border station or Rawal Pindi guessed, for instance, that the surgeon worshipped the girl who had married Kent a year ago.

He paid her no marked attention, avoided meeting her in fact. The only one who suspected his feeling

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