toward the mouth of the tank.

"This!" he answered.

Magin watched him. He did not catch the connection at first. He saw it
quickly enough, however. In his pale translucent eyes there was
something very like a flare.

"Look out--or we shall go together after all!"

"We shall go together, after all," repeated Gaston. "And here is your
place in the sun!"

Magin still watched, as the little flame flickered through the windless
air. But he did not move.

"It will go out! And you have not the courage Apache!"

"You will see, Prussian!" The match stopped, at last, above the open
hole; but the hand that held it trembled a little, and so did the
strange low voice that said: "This at least I can do--for that great
lady, far away."

The peasant on the bluff, prostrated toward Mecca with his forehead in
the dust, was startled out of his prayer by a roar in the basin below
him. There where the trim-white jinn-boat of the _Firengi_ had been was
now a blazing mass of wreckage, out of which came fierce cracklings,
hissings, sounds not to be named. As he stared at it the wreckage fell
apart, began to disappear in a cloud of smoke and steam that lengthened
toward the southern gateway of the basin. And in the turbid water, cut
by swift sharks' fins, he saw a sudden bright trail of red, redder than
any fire or sunrise. It paled gradually, the smoke melted after the
steam, the current caught the last charred fragments of wreckage and
drew them out of sight.

The peasant watched it all silently, as if waiting for some new magic of
the _Firengi_, from his high bank of the Karun--that snow-born river
bound for distant palms, that had seen so many generations of the faces
of men, so many of the barks to which men trust their hearts, their
hopes, their treasures, as it wound, century after century, from the
mountains to the sea. Then, at last, the peasant folded his hands anew
and bowed his head toward Mecca.

THE GAY OLD DOG[9]

[Note 9: Copyright, 1917, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company.
Copyright, 1918, by Edna Ferber.]

BY EDNA FERBER

From _The Metropolitan Magazine_

Those of you who have dwelt--or even lingered--in Chicago, Illinois
(this is not a humorous story), are familiar with the region known as
the Loop. For those others of you to whom Chicago is a transfer point
between New York and San Francisco there is presented this brief
explanation:

The Loop is a clamorous, smoke-infested district embraced b