nounced?"

"No, indeed; I would have given much to know, and assuredly the dog,
whoever he was, should have been made to suffer."

"It was Hassan. The villain met me when I was with the gang, and boasted
that it was he who had sent me there. He had told the news to some
official, who had, of course, repeated it to the sultan; doubtless he
concealed his own share in the matter, otherwise he too would, next time
he returned here, have had to pay for his part in it."

"I will make him pay more heavily than the sultan would," Ben Ibyn said
sternly; "I will speak to my friends among the merchants, and henceforth
no Berber will buy aught from him; and we have hitherto been his best
customers. But let us not waste our time in speaking of this wretch. How
comes it that you are walking freely in the streets of Tripoli? I can
see that your face is stained, although you are no longer a Nubian."

Gervaise told him how it was that he was free to walk in the city after
his work was done.

"I shall now," he went on, "be able to carry out any plan of escape that
may occur to me; but before I leave, as I shall certainly do ere long,
I mean to settle my score with Hassan, and I pray you to send one of
the men who were with me in the galley, and whom you took into your
employment, directly you hear that his ship is in harbour. Do not give
him either a note or a message: bid him simply place himself in the
road between the prison gate and the palace, and look fixedly at me as I
pass. I shall know it is a signal that Hassan is in the port."

"Can I aid you in your flight? I will willingly do so."

"All that I shall need is the garb of a peasant," Gervaise said. "I
might buy one unnoticed; but, in the first place, I have no money, and
in the second, when it is known that I have escaped, the trader might
recall the fact that one of the slave overseers had purchased a suit of
him."

"The dress of an Arab would be the best," the merchant said. "That I
will procure and hold in readiness for you. On the day when I send
you word that Hassan is here, I will see that the gate of my garden is
unbarred at night, and will place the garments down just behind it. You
mean, I suppose, to travel by land?"

"I shall do so for some distance. Were I to steal a boat from the port,
it would be missed in the morning, and I be overtaken. I shall therefore
go along the coast for some distance and get a boat at one of the
villages, choosing my time when t