a
detail. It's the men. Good men!"

She peered into the incense-smoke, as if exorcising the powers of
darkness.

"They're not dead, not all of them!" she exclaimed with conviction.

"I wish I could believe you!"

"But you _must_ believe me! Something tells me some of our good chaps
are still alive. All of them perhaps."

"Impossible!" He shook his head. "Even if they escaped the explosion,
the Jannati Shahr devils must have massacred them." He shuddered
slightly. "That's the worst of it. Death is all right. But the
crucifixion, and all--"

"Cold reason paints a cruel picture, I admit," the woman answered,
laying a hand on the man's. "But you know--a woman's intuition. I
don't believe as you do. And the major--and that rumor we got from old
Nasr ed Din, the Hejaz rug-merchant down on Hester Street, how about
that?"

"Yes, I know. But--"

"How could a rumor like that come through, about a big, white-skinned,
red-haired _Ajam_ slave held by that tribe near Jeddah? How could it,
unless there were some truth back of it?"

"He wandered away into the desert, quite insane. It's not impossible
he might have been captured. By Allah!" And the man struck the table
hard. "If I really believed Nasr ed Din--"

"Well?"

"I'd go again, if I died for it!"

"The pronoun's wrong. _We'd_ go!"

"Yes, _we_!" He took her hand. "We'd trail that rumor down and have
Bohannan out of there, and the others too, if--but no, no, the thing's
impossible!"

"Nothing is impossible, I tell you, in the East. And haven't we had
miracles enough? After we were judged pirates and condemned to die,
by the International Aero Tribunal, wasn't it a miracle about
that pardon? That immunity, for your vibratory secrets that have
revolutionized the defensive tactics of the League's air-forces?"

She smiled up at him, through the vapor. "It's the impossible that
happens, these days! The soul within me tells me some of our chaps are
still alive, out there!"

She waved her smoky wand toward the large-scale map of Arabia on the
wall.

"But Rrisa," said he. "About the others, there's no sense of guilt. I
feel, though, like a murderer about Rrisa."

"Rrisa still lives!"

He shook his head.

"The incense tells me." She insisted. "My heart tells me!"

"Allah make it so! But even if he is dead, he died like the others--a
man!"

"In pursuit of an ideal. We all had that, a dream and an ideal."

"Yes. It wasn't the treasure, of course," he mused.