“I know all Muhammad Anim's plans. Bull-with-a-beard believes himself a statesman, yet he told me all he knows! He has told me how Germany plans to draw Turkey in and to force Turkey to proclaim a jihad. As if I did not know it first, almost before the Germans knew it! Fools! The jihad will recoil on them! It will be like a cobra, striking whoever stirs it! A typhoon, smiting right and left! Christianity is doomed, and the Germans call themselves Christians! Fools! Rome called herself Christian--and where is Rome? “But we, my warrior, when Muhammad Anim gets the word from Germany and gives the sign, and the 'Hills' are afire, and the whole East roars in the flame of the jihad--we will put ourselves at the head of that jihad, and the East and the world is ours!” King smiled at her. “The East isn't very well armed,” he objected. “Mere numbers--” “Numbers?” She laughed at him. “The West has the West by the throat! It is tearing itself! They will drag in America! There will be no armed nation with its hands free--and while those wolves fight, other wolves shall come and steal the meat! The old gods, who built these caverns in the 'Hills,' are laughing! They are getting ready! Thou and I--” As she coupled him and herself together in one plan she read the changed expression of his face--the very quickly passing cloud that even the best-trained man can not control. “I know!” she asserted, sitting upright and coming out of her dream to face facts as their master. She looked more lovely now than ever, although twice as dangerous. “You are thinking of your brother--of his head! That I am a murderess who can never be your friend! Is that not so?” He did not answer, but his eyes may have betrayed something, for she looked as if he had struck her. Leaning forward, she held the gold-hilted dagger out to him, hilt first. “Take it and stab me!” she ordered. “Stab--if you blame me for your brother's death! I should have known him for your brother if I had come on him in the dark!--His head might have come from your shoulders!--You were like a man holding up his own head, as I have seen in pictures in a book! I would never have killed him!” Her golden hair fell all about his shoulders, and its scent was not intended to be sobering. She ran warm fingers through his hair while she held the knife toward him with the other hand. “Take it and stab!” “No,” he said. “No!” she laughed. “No! You are my warrior--my man--my well--beloved! You have come to me alone out of all the world! You would no more stab me than the gods would forget me!” Their eyes were on each other's--deep looking into deep.