a little oblong box, together with a quaint signet ring, were ingeniously attached to the crown by means of silk threads tied around the knot of the tassel. I glanced rapidly about me. I, alone, had seen the cap roll out upon the pavement.

A hard jerk, and I had the box and the ring free in my hand. The tall carriage-despatcher, his ferocious efforts now seconded by a native policeman who freely employed his cane upon the thinly-clad persons of the group, had terminated the scuffle.

Right and left active figures darted, pursued for some little distance by the policeman and the two men from the hotel. There were no captures.

A very dusty and bemused Ali Mohammed, his shaven skull robbing him of much of the dignity which belonged to his tarbûsh, confronted me, ruefully dusting his garments.

11

“Your tarbûsh, my friend,” I said, restoring his property to him with a bow.

One piercing glance he cast into the interior, then—

“O Allah!” he wailed—“O Allah! I am robbed! Yet——”

A sort of martyred resignation, a beatific peace, crept over his features.

“To war against Abû Tabâh is the act of a fool,” he declared. “To have obtained the Bey’s money would have been good, but to have obtained peace is better!”

IV

I awoke that night from a troubled sleep and from a dream wherein magnetic fingers caressed my forehead hypnotically. For a moment I could not believe that I was truly awake; the long ivory hand of my dreams was still moving close before me with a sort of slow fanning movement—and other, nimble, fingers crept beneath my pillow!

Of my distaste for impulse I have already spoken, and even now, with my mind not wholly under control, I profited by those years of self-imposed discipline. Without fully opening my eyes, cautiously, inch by inch, I moved my hand to that side of the bed nearer to the wall, where there reposed a leather holster containing my pistol.

My fingers closed over the butt of the weapon;12 and in a flash I became wide awake ... and had the ring of the barrel within an inch of the smiling face of 

 Prev. P 7/187 next