Part 40 (1/2)

Byng lay full length on his stomach, and buried his face in his arms He was still too full of wrath for words

”I'd kick his mother, if I couldn't land on hi his new bearings It was a four-walled jail-one-doored, one-ed, iron-barred-ill-sestive of the opposite of home, sweet home to call forth humor, even fro ”They'll quarantine the pair of us for being lousy, and they'll turn the perishi+ng salt-water hose on us We're due for the brig for Gawd kno long; our reppitation's gone; we've been spat on by a-by a Arab, and we 'aven't hit 'ione an' lost the pup! Gawd! There ain't no ood in nothin'!”

Which shows noin his sorrow overlooked a circus in the floor that Crothers eyed with keen curiosity They were anchored in the solid blocks of stone

”It's better than it one and chained us up to those!”

V

Arabia has some peculiarities, not all of them discreditable, which she does not share with any other country There is, for instance, the kind custo free of slaves when they have rendered seven years' good service

That rule (and it is rather rule than law) tends to eliminate all class and color prejudice Provided that a man will bow to Mecca three times daily and refrain froave hile with the best He may even marry whom he will and can afford; and he may be whatever his ability, ambition, and audacity dictate

And Hassan Ah had never been a slave, so he had even less to overcoht have been the case He stalked Adra socially unconderoo jobs His old fish-catching days had given him an intimate acquaintance with the reef, and his sh of beam-on-seas, ell suited to the local type of craft

So nobody questioned his right to the title of harbor pilot And if certain perquisites ith an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor of it, in Arabia?

nobody can pass the reef at night in shallow-draft lateen-sail boats without having hih he was never ostensibly paid for his services, it was understood that he performed pilot service in return for certain other opportunities that soh sea that were not discussed in public, it was understood that Hassan Ah could have discussed thehly as anybody if he chose

On the whole, then, and within li of a personality Men listened to hirant favors on occasion his words had weight

The sun was very nearly in its zenith, beating down on dry Arabia between racing black clouds, when he had finished talking to the local council in the ramshackle old council-house, skin and mat curtained, that faced the sheik's where the main street broadened for a hundred filthy yards into a ument he had held a pure-white bull terrier between his knees as proof that he knehereof he spoke

”Can any of you hold hi bitten?” he demanded And they did not seem to care to try

”I know the ways of these ant expressions of content in proof of it

So the others in the stuffy council place gave the dog a wide berth and no privilege, but conceded hiht to hold the beast, if he wanted to, without personal defilement And since the way of the world is that a man who has won the first of his contentions can win all the rest with half the ease, he persuaded them with a hurricane of black man's rhetoric to do what Arabs consider almost wicked

Unbelievers who are prisoners should die, beyond all question

”As the dregs of oil shall the fruit of the tree of Al Zakkum boil in the bellies of the damned!” the sheik quoted ”They should be hurried, therefore, to the punishued him

”Then they will land men from the shi+p, ill search our houses,” he asserted ”Is there a majority in the council ould like to be searched by unbelievers?”

”Then bind them, and take them to their shi+p, and tell a tale ofAsk an indee”

”They, too, will tell their tale!” said Hassan Ah in perfect Arabic

Unlike the e the ue; they teach it as carefully as they talk it, and this negro spoke like an Arab of the blood