with any other country. There is, for instance, the kind
custom that dictates the setting 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 from pork and wine, he may wear whatever skin God gave
him and yet mingle 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 overcome
than might have been the case. He stalked Adra socially uncondemned
where once he had caught fish, groomed camels, and done other irritating
jobs. His old fish-catching days had given him an intimate acquaintance
with the reef, and his small-boat seamanship, born of hard pulling in
the trough of beam-on-seas, was well suited to the local type of craft.

So nobody questioned his right to the title of harbor pilot. And if
certain perquisites went with 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 him on board; and though he was never ostensibly paid
for his services, it was understood that he performed pilot service in
return for certain other opportunities that sometimes came his way. When
things happened on the high sea that were not discussed in public, it
was understood that Hassan Ah could have discussed them as thoroughly as
anybody if he chose.

On the whole, then, and within limits that were only more or less
definable, he was something of a personality. Men listened to him when
he raised his voice in argument, and as one who could grant 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 market-place. All through his argument he had held a
pure-white bull terrier between his knees as proof that he knew whereof
he spoke.

"Can any of you hold him without being bitten?" he demanded. And they
did not seem to care to try.

"I know the ways of these men!" he asserted, drawing extravagant
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