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Updated: May 4, 2025
Things had reached this crisis, and Peter the Great, having hurled aside his two assailants, was on the point of rushing to the rescue of his friend, when the door burst open, and Ben-Ahmed stood before them quivering with indignation. "Is this your return for my forbearance? Be-gone!" he shouted to his son in a voice of thunder. Osman knew his father too well to require a second bidding.
On turning a sharp bend in the road where a high bank had shut out their view they saw a horseman approaching at a furious gallop. "It is the Dey!" exclaimed Ben-Ahmed. "So it am!" responded Peter. "He can't make the turn of the road and live!" cried the Moor, all his dignified self-possession vanishing as he prepared for action. "I will check the horse," he added, in a quick, low voice.
"I heard it from Peter the Great, who aided you on the occasion. And he told me that the Dey has often since then offered to do you some good turn, but that you have always declined." "That is true," said Ben-Ahmed, with the look of a man into whose mind a new idea had been introduced.
"Ben-Ahmed," said the middy, with vehemence, "the father of the English girl you are so fond of and whom I love is in terrible danger, and if you are a true man as I firmly believe you are you will save him." The Moor smiled very slightly at the youth's vehemence, pointed with the mouthpiece of his hookah to a cushion, and bade him sit down and tell him all about it.
As Peter had prophesied, Ben-Ahmed did indeed leave no stone unturned to recover Hester Sommers, but there was one consideration which checked him a good deal, and prevented his undertaking the search as openly as he wished, and that was the fear that the Dey himself might get wind of what he was about, and so become inquisitive as to the cause of the stir which so noted a man was making about a runaway slave.
The impatience of the middy was somewhat relieved, however, when he saw that Ben-Ahmed, on reaching the main road, put spurs to his horse, and rode towards the city at full gallop.
Let not the reader imagine that we are drawing the longbow here, and making these Moors to be more cruel than they really were. Though Ben-Ahmed was an amiable specimen, he was not a typical Algerine, for cruelty of the most dreadful kind was often perpetrated by these monsters in the punishment of trivial offences in those days.
Although an old man, he was still active and powerful. He seized the reins of the horse as it was passing, and, bringing his whole weight and strength to bear, checked it so far that it made a false step and stumbled. This had the effect of sending the Dey out of the saddle like a bomb from a mortar, and of hurling Ben-Ahmed to the ground.
A pile of empty casks, laid against the wall in the form of a giant staircase, showed how Hester had climbed, and a crushed bush on the other side testified to her mode of descent. Ben-Ahmed and Peter ran up to the spot together. "Dey can't hab gone far, massa. You want de horses, eh?" asked the latter. "Yes. Two horses, quick!" Peter went off to the stables in hot haste, remarking as he ran
"You break his fall, Peter. He'll come off on the left side." "Das so, massa," said Peter, as he sprang to the other side of the narrow road. He had barely done so, when the Dey came thundering towards them. "Stand aside!" he shouted as he came on, for he was a fearless horseman and quite collected, though in such peril. But Ben-Ahmed would not stand aside.
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