Chapter 2: The Yellow Snake

When the young man named Sanang left the bed-chamber of Tressa Norne he turned to the right in the carpeted corridor outside and hurried toward the hotel elevator. But he did not ring for the lift; instead he took the spiral iron stairway which circled it, and mounted hastily to the floor above.

Here was his own apartment and he entered it with a key bearing the hotel tag. A dusky-skinned powerful old man wearing a grizzled beard and a greasy broadcloth coat of old-fashioned cut known to provincials as a “Prince Albert” looked up from where he was seated cross-legged upon the sofa, sharpening a curved knife on a whetstone.

“Gutchlug,” stammered Sanang, “I am afraid of her! What happened two years ago at the temple happened again a moment since, there in her very bedroom! She made a yellow death-adder out of nothing and placed it upon the threshold, and mocked me with laughter. May Thirty Thousand Calamities overtake her! May Erlik seize her! May her eyes rot out and her limbs fester! May the seven score and three principal devils--”

“You chatter like a temple ape,” said Gutchlug tranquilly. “Does Keuke Mongol die or live? That alone interests me.”

“Gutchlug,” faltered the young man, “thou knowest that m-my heart is inclined to mercy toward this young Yezidee--”

“I know that it is inclined to lust,” said the other bluntly.

Sanang’s pale face flamed.

“Listen,” he said. “If I had not loved her better than life had I dared go that day to the temple to take her for my own?”

“You loved life better,” said Gutchlug. “You fled when it rained snakes on the temple steps--you and your Tchortcha horsemen! Kai! I also ran. But I gave every soldier thirty blows with a stick before I slept that night. And you should have had your thirty, also, conforming to the Yarlig, my Tougtchi.”

Sanang, still holding his hat and cane and carrying his overcoat over his left arm, looked down at the heavy, brutal features of Gutchlug Khan--at the cruel mouth with its crooked smile under the grizzled beard; at the huge hands--the powerful hands of a murderer--now deftly honing to a razor-edge the Kalmuck knife held so firmly yet lightly in his great blunt fingers.

“Listen attentively, Prince Sanang,” growled Gutchlug, pausing in his monotonous task to test the blade’s edge on his thumb--”Does the Yezidee Keuke Mongol live? Yes or no?”

Sanang hesitated, moistened his pallid lips. “She dares not betray us.”

“By what pledge?”

“Fear.”

“That is no pledge. You also were afraid, yet you went to the temple!”

“She has listened to the Yarlig. She has looked upon her shroud. She has admitted that she desires to live. Therein lies her pledge to us.”

“And she placed a yellow snake at your feet!” sneered Gutchlug. “Prince Sanang, tell me, what man or what devil in all the chronicles of the past has ever tamed a Snow-Leopard?” And he continued to hone his yataghan.

“Gutchlug--”

“No, she dies,” said the other tranquilly.

“Not yet!”

“When, then?”

“Gutchlug, thou knowest me. Hear my pledge! At her first gesture toward treachery--her first thought of betrayal--I myself will end it all.”

“You promise to slay this young snow-leopardess?”

“By the four companions, I swear to kill her with my own hands!”

Gutchlug sneered. “Kill her--yes--with the kiss that has burned thy lips to ashes for all these months. I know thee, Sanang. Leave her to me. Dead she will no longer trouble thee.”

“Gutchlug!”

“I hear, Prince Sanang.”

“Strike when I nod. Not until then.”

“I hear, Tougtchi. I understand thee, my Banneret. I whet my knife. Kai!”

Sanang looked at him, put on his top-hat and overcoat, pulled on a pair of white evening gloves.

“I go forth,” he said more pleasantly.

“I remain here to talk to my seven ancestors and sharpen my knife,” remarked Gutchlug.

“When the white world and the yellow world and the brown world and the black world finally fall before the Hassanis,” said Sanang with a quick smile, “I shall bring thee to her. Gutchlug--once--before she is veiled, thou shalt behold what is lovelier than Eve.”

The other stolidly whetted his knife.

Sanang pulled out a gold cigarette case, lighted a cigarette with an air.

“I go among Germans,” he volunteered amiably. “The huns swam across two oceans, but, like the unclean swine, it is their own throats they cut when they swim! Well, there is only one God. And not very many angels. Erlik is greater. And there are many million devils to do his bidding. Adieu. There is rice and there is koumiss in the frozen closet. When I return you shall have been asleep for hours.”

When Sanang left the hotel one of two young men seated in the hotel lobby got up and strolled out after him.

A few minutes later the other man went to the elevator, ascended to the fourth floor, and entered an apartment next to the one occupied by Sanang.

There was another man there, lying on the lounge and smoking a cigar. Without a word, they both went leisurely about the matter of disrobing for the night.