" said the Colonel. And so bent was he
on the point, that after dinner he came to me in the lounge and laid a
loaded six-shooter beside my coffee-cup. The younger Miss Bostock grew
pale. It looked an ugly, cumbrous, devastating weapon.

"But, my dear Colonel," I protested, "it's against the law to carry
fire-arms."

"Law--what law?"

"Why the law of France," said I.

This staggered him. The fact of there being decent laws in foreign parts
has staggered many an honest Briton. He counselled a damnation of the
law, and finally, in order to humour him, I allowed him to thrust the
uncomfortable thing into my hip-pocket.

"Colonel," said I, when I took leave of him an hour later, "I have armed
myself out of pure altruism. I shan't be able to sit down in peace and
comfort for the rest of the evening. Should I accidentally do so, my
blood will be on your head."

CHAPTER XII

The tram that passes the hotel gates took me into the town and dropped
me at the Place du Gouvernement. With its strange fusion of East
and West, its great white-domed mosque flanked by the tall minaret
contrasting with its formal French colonnaded facades, its groupings of
majestic white-robed forms and commonplace figures in caps and hard
felt hats; the mystery of its palm trees, and the crudity of its
flaring electric lights, it gave an impression of unreality, of a modern
contractor's idea of Fairyland, where anything grotesque might assume an
air of normality. The moon shone full in the heavens, and as I crossed
the Place I saw the equestrian statue of the Duke of Orleans silhouetted
against the mosque. The port, to the east, was quiet at this hour, and
the shipping lay dreamily in the moonlight. Far away one could see the
dim outlines of the Kabyle Mountains, and the vague melting of sea and
sky into a near horizon. The undefinable smell of the East was in the
air.

The Cafe de Bordeaux, which forms an angle of the Place, blazed in front
of me. A few hardy souls, a Zouave or two, an Arab, a bored Englishman
and his wife, and some French inhabitants were sitting outside in the
chilliness. I entered. The cafe was filled with a nondescript crowd, and
the rattle of dominoes rose above the hum of talk. In a corner near the
door I discovered the top of a silk hat projecting above a widely opened
newspaper grasped by two pudgy hands, and I recognised the Professor.

"Monsieur," said he, when I had taken a seat at his table, "if the
unknown te