t you shall
have an answer within twenty-four hours."

Outside, as we turned our faces toward Jerusalem's gray wall,
Grim opened up a little and gave me a suggestion of something in
the wind.

"Did you see what he has in that cupboard?"

"Yes. Two Arab costumes. Two short crow-bars."

"Did you notice the grayish dust on the rug--three or four
footprints at the corner near the cupboard?"

"Can't say I did."

"No. You wouldn't be looking for it. These men who pose as
intellectuals never believe that any one else has brains. They
fool themselves. There's one thing no man can afford to do, East
of the sun or West of the moon. You can steal, slay, intrigue,
burn--break all the Ten Commandments except one, and have a
chance to get away with it. There's just one thing you can't do,
and succeed. He's done it!"

"And the thing is?"

"Cheat a woman!"

"You mean his house keeper? She who answered the door?"

Grim nodded.

Chapter Twelve

"You know you'll get scuppered if you're found out!"

Two days passed again without my seeing Grim, although I called
on him repeatedly at the "Junior Staff Officers' Mess" below the
Zionist Hospital. Suliman, the eight-year-old imp of Arab
mischief, who did duty as page-boy met me on each occasion at the
door and took grinning delight in disappointing me.

He was about three and a half feet high--coal-black, with a
tarboosh worn at an angle on his kinky hair and a flashing white
grin across his snub-nosed face that would have made an archangel
count the change out of two piastres twice. Suliman and cool
cheek were as obvious team-mates as the Gemini, and I was one of
a good number, that included every single member of that
unofficial mess, who could never quite see what Grim found so
admirable in him. Grim never explained.

Taking the cue from his master, neither did Suliman ever
explain anything to any one but Grim, who seemed to understand
him perfectly.

"Jimgrim not here. No, not coming back. Much business.
Good-bye!"

Somehow you couldn't suspect that kid of telling the truth.
However, there was nothing for it but to go away, with a
conviction in the small of your back that he was grinning
mischievously after you.

Grim had found him one day starving and lousy in the archway of
the Jaffa Gate, warming his fingers at a guttering candle-end
preparatory to making a meal off the wax. He took him home and
made Martha, the old Russian maid-of-