wished
him a year in it.

As he plunged into the crowd that checked and surged immediately
in front of the line of Sikhs, a small man in Arab costume with
the lower part of his face well covered by the kaffiyi,* rushed
out from the corner behind the bootblacks and drove a long knife
home to the hilt between the policeman's shoulder-blades. I
wasn't shocked. I wasn't even sorry. [*Head-dress that hangs
down over the shoulders.]

Bedreddin Shah shrieked and fell forward. Blood gushed from the
wound. The crowd surged in curiously, and then fell back before
the advancing Sikhs. A British officer who had heard the
victim's cry came spurring his horse into the crowd from inside
the gate. In his effort to get near the victim he only added to
the confusion.

The murderer, who seemed in no particular hurry, dodged quietly
in and out among the swarm of bewildered peasants, and in thirty
seconds had utterly disappeared. A minute later I saw Grim
offering his services as interpreter and stooping over the dying
man to try to catch the one word he was struggling to repeat.

Chapter Fourteen

"Windy bellies without hearts in them."

Djemal's coffee shop is run by a Turkish gentleman whose real
name is Yussuf. One name, and the shorter the better, had been
plenty in the days when Djemal Pasha ran Jerusalem with iron
ruthlessness, and consequent success of a certain sort. When
Djemal was the Turkish Governor, every proprietor of every kind
of shop had to stand in the doorway at attention whenever Djemal
passed, and woe betide the laggard!

It would not have paid any one, in those days, to name any sort
of shop after Djemal Pasha. Even the provider of the rope that
throttled the offender would have made no profit, because the
rope would simply have been looted from the nearest store.
The hangman would have been the nearest soldier, whose pay
was already two years in arrears. So Yussuf's own name done
in Turkish characters used to stand over the door before the
British came.

It was Djemal Pasha's considered judgment that Yussuf cooked the
best coffee in Jerusalem. So whenever the despot was in the city
he conferred on Yussuf the inestimable privilege of supplying him
with coffee at odd moments, under threat of the bastinado if the
stuff were not suitably sweet and hot. The only money that ever
changed hands in that connection was when the tax-gatherer came
down on Yussuf for an extra levy, because of