ere silent. South rose a great wall of white mountain, which
I took to be the Palantuken. I could see the roads running to the
passes, and the smoke of camps and horse-lines right under the cliffs.

I had learned what I needed. We were in the outbuildings of a big
country house two or three miles south of the city. The nearest point
of the Russian front was somewhere in the foothills of the Palantuken.

As I descended I heard, thin and faint and beautiful, like the cry of a
wild bird, the muezzin from the minarets of Erzerum.

When I dropped through the trap the others were awake. Hussin was
setting food on the table, and viewing my descent with anxious
disapproval.

'It's all right,' I said; 'I won't do it again, for I've found out all
I wanted. Peter, old man, the biggest job of your life is before you!'

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Greenmantle

Peter scarcely looked up from his breakfast.

'I'm willing, Dick,' he said. 'But you mustn't ask me to be friends
with Stumm. He makes my stomach cold, that one.'

For the first time he had stopped calling me 'Cornelis'. The day of
make-believe was over for all of us.

'Not to be friends with him,' I said, 'but to bust him and all his
kind.'

'Then I'm ready,' said Peter cheerfully. 'What is it?'

I spread out the maps on the divan. There was no light in the place
but Blenkiron's electric torch, for Hussin had put out the lantern.
Peter got his nose into the things at once, for his intelligence work
in the Boer War had made him handy with maps. It didn't want much
telling from me to explain to him the importance of the one I had
looted.

'That news is worth many a million pounds,' said he, wrinkling his
brows, and scratching delicately the tip of his left ear. It was a way
he had when he was startled.

'How can we get it to our friends?'

Peter cogitated. 'There is but one way. A man must take it. Once, I
remember, when we fought the Matabele it was necessary to find out
whether the chief Makapan was living. Some said he had died, others
that he'd gone over the Portuguese border, but I believed he lived. No
native could tell us, and since his kraal was well defended no runner
could get through. So it was necessary to send a man.'

Peter lifted up his head and laughed. 'The man found the chief
Makapan. He was very much alive, and made good shooting with a
shot-gun. But the man brought the chief Makapan out of his kraal and
handed him over to