on; to unself-conscious to have been acquired. I
hazarded a guess.

"A red man, then. Carlisle for education. Swallowed again by
the first desert he stayed in for more than a week."

"Wrong. His name is Grim. Sounds like Scandinavian ancestry, on
one side. James Schuyler Grim--Dutch, then, on the other; and
some English. Ten generations in the States at any rate. He can
tell you all about this country. Why not call on him?"

It did not need much intelligence to agree to that suggestion;
but the British military take their code with them to the
uttermost ends of earth, behind which they wonder why so many
folks with different codes, or none, dislike them.

"Write me an introduction," I said.

"You won't need one. Just call on him. He lives at a place they
call the junior Staff Officers' Mess--up beyond the Russian
Convent and below the Zionist Hospital."

So I went that evening, finding the way with difficulty because
they talk at least eighteen languages in Jerusalem and, with the
exception of official residences, no names were posted anywhere.
That was not an official residence. It was a sort of communal
boarding-house improvised by a dozen or so officers in preference
to the bug-laden inconvenience of tents--in a German-owned
(therefore enemy property) stone house at the end of an alley, in
a garden full of blooming pomegranates.

I sent my card in by a flat-footed old Russian female, who ran
down passages and round corners like a wet hen, trying to find a
man-servant. The place seemed deserted, but presently she came
on her quarry in the back yard, and a very small boy in a
tarboosh and knickerbockers carried the card on a tray into a
room on the left. Through the open door I could hear one quiet
question and a high-pitched disclaimer of all knowledge; then an
order, sounding like a grumble, and the small boy returned to the
hall to invite me in, in reasonably good English, of which he
seemed prouder than I of my Arabic.

So I went into the room on the left, with that Bedouin still in
mind. There was only one man in there, who got out of a deep
armchair as I entered, marking his place in a book with a
Damascus dagger. He did not look much more than middle height,
nor more than medium dark complexioned, and he wore a major's
khaki uniform.

"Beg pardon," I said. "I've disturbed the wrong man. I came to
call on an American named Major Grim."

"I'm Grim."

"Must be a mistake, though