LITMIR.BIZ

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jumped down into the cellar, struck a match and looked about him, but did not trouble to go as far as the end wall because there was hardly headroom and he had to stoop. Beside there might be snakes and vermin. So he did not notice a door at the end, communicating with the smaller shed next door, nor see the print of footsteps leading from it.

      He climbed out again, sweating and dusty but almost busting with pleasure at his good luck. The Jew in black pants, peering down into the hole beside him, felt it incumbent to translate his thoughts into speech that might be understood.

      “Well, I never! Those Arabs, mister, there is nothing they stop at! As a snake in the grass so is an Arab!”

      “Lies about Arabs won’t help you, my lad! You’d better stay here. Understand me?”

      “Sure I stay here.”

      Ticknor laughed.

      “You’re a strange race. I never saw such perfectly acted conscious innocence. Talk of Chinamen—they’re not in it with you.”

      He went to the door and looked up and down the street, hoping to catch sight of a soldier or policeman—anyone at all who might be sent to bring the provost-marshal’s men; or better yet, sent running with a note to Jenkins.

      There was no one in uniform in sight. He scribbled a note on the back of a private letter, replaced it in its envelope, readdressed it to the brigadier, contrived to seal it after a fashion by relicking the old gum, and beckoned a small boy who was sitting smoking outside a shop on the opposite side of the street fifty yards away.

      Preferring not to advertise his find too widely for the moment, he judge it better to do his talking inside the building. So the small boy got a good view of the trapdoor, and a glimpse of what lay underneath.

      “Listen. Do you know General Jenkins?”

      The small boy nodded. There were few things he ever forgot, once he had rubbed acquaintance with them.

      “Do you know how to find him?”

      He nodded again.

      “Take this letter to him, but don’t show it to anybody else. If you come back quickly with an answer I’ll give you five piasters.”

      The bribe was enormous. The small boy took the envelope and started off at a run. Ticknor returned to the trapdoor to gloat over his discovery and smoke a cigarette of triumph.

      So again he missed something that might have given him thought. The boy stopped at the shop near which he had been sitting, and called through the open door.

      “Oh, Jimgrim!”

      A man in Arab costume came and stood in the shadow between the door-posts.

      “Over there in the big shed there is a trapdoor. It is open. Underneath are rifles. An officer gave me this.”

      “Who is it for?”

      “General Jenkins.”

      “All right. Run with it.”

      Suliman sat and pulled his boots off, for they were a concession to convention, not adjunct to speed. Stringing them around his neck by the laces he set off as fast as youth would let him.

      Jimgrim turned back into the shop, smiling with tired eyes, to resume his conversation with a real Arab where it had broken off.

      “Now, Ibrahim Charkas. Let’s have that over again. No lies this time or I’ll wring your neck.

      CHAPTER XI

      “There is money...take it and go away.”

      When Jim received the hundred-piaster note from Suliman he went at once into Mahommed Kaftar’s coffee-shop and steamed it over the kettle until it fell into the original three pieces—two ragged halves and a strip of gummed paper. Then he drank coffee leisurely until the paper dried, turning it over on his knee and chuckling to himself.

      “Mustn’t say a word against Jenkins—um-m-m!”

      Sir Henry Kettle’s and General Anthony’s injunction began to fit, still vaguely, into something suggestive of strategy based on information.

      “Give a rascal rope enough and he’s sure to hang himself.”

      But one must take precautions lest he trip too many others with the rope before the end comes. He made up his mind to see Ibrahim Charkas at once, not that there would be any obvious advantage to the community in saving that evasive rascal from the consequence of dallying with Jinks’ spider web; but he did have instructions to discover who stole that TNT, and if one thing should lead to another, and that to Jinks’ downfall, he would still be obeying orders.

      Ibrahim Charkas ran one of those nondescript Arab stores in which everything was sold from sewing thread to tinned biscuits and souvenir photographs. He had even sold whisky until the provost-marshal interfered. Loss of the surreptitious liquor trade had cost him the custom of Sikhs and Gurkhas in addition to a staggering fine, so that business was not what it used to be and the stock in trade looked the part.

      Dogged at a little distance by Suliman, who would not have traded his employment just then for a promise of paradise, Jim strolled up-street looking like an Arab whose wives were attending to business for him, lord of the earth and of leisure. There were plenty of other Arabs in the street and he had to be careful, but he watched his chance outside Charkas’ shop to toss Suliman a coin in which to buy breakfast and tell him to wait until call. Then he went in ostensibly for cigarettes.

      Charkas came out obsequiously from a little room in the rear to greet him, for the day was past when the store would support an assistant, except for a mere fetch-and-carry nonentity, who could hardly be trusted to sweep the place out least he steal whatever he could reach. Just then the nonentity was away on some kind of errand.

      “Shu bitrid, ya khawaja?” (“What do you want, sir?”)

      Jim countered in English, and opened with his heaviest gun, laying down the two portions of the bank-note on a table at the back of the shop.

      “Just take a look at those. When did you see them last?”

      Charkas did not seem to know which to be surprised at more—the question or being addressed in English.

      “Who are you that prefer a foreign language to your own?”

      “None of your business! This is your business—this note—it’s important—when did you see it last?”

      “How should I know? I never saw it. I don’t accept torn money.”

      “Look again. It was pasted together when you saw it last. I know where you had it from, but how did you get rid of it?”

      “To whom should I pay a hundred piasters? Tee-hee-hee! Absurd! The business of this store is no longer that much in a week.”

      “Did you ever see this?” Jim asked him, turning over the strip of paper in both hands so as to show first the signature of Charkas on one side and then Jenkins’ name on the other. “It came of the back of that note.”

      Charkas began to look like a cornered rat. The pupils of his eyes became pin-points, and narrow teeth showed prominently between his thin, parted lips. He made a quick motion with his hand, but Jim was quicker and seized him by both arms. Jim put his foot on it, and then picked up the strip of paper he had had to let fall.

      “Better not try to make a hanging matter of it. Better use your head. It’s fairly easy to make sense out of this writing. It’s a letter from you to General Jenkins describing what certain men are doing, what they intend to do, and stating why you need more money. Jenkins gave you that hundred piasters. What did you do with it?”

      There naturally flashed across Charkas’ mind his recent interview with Jenkins, of which Jim knew nothing, any more that Jim knew that the man from whom the hundred-piaster note had been taken did not come by it from someone else, who in turn might have had it from a third man. Charkas decided that Jenkins must

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