whom he chooses on Galata Bridge."

"When I dine in a public place"--the _Osmanli_ smiled cunningly from the
depths of small pig-like eyes--"I shield myself behind a screen. Thus
may I observe unobserved."

The sun had set, but the yellow after-glow still lingered in the sky
behind Stamboul as the two men stood looking toward Galata Bridge, where
their quarry had escaped them, and across the Golden Horn.

A pyramid of domes, flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily
proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata
Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where
there had been an eddying current of turbans and _tarbooshes_,
bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting
place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the belated
few.

To the jaded imagination of Martin _Effendi_ and his companion, Abdul
Said _Bey_, the falling of night over the quadruple city, smothering
more than a million souls under a single blanket of blackness, made no
appeal. They were watching a yacht.

Over the Pera roofs swept flocks of crows to roost in their garden
rookeries at the center of the town. Across the harbor water, now too
gloomy to reveal its thousands of jelly-fish, drifted the complaining
cries of the loons. Then as the occasional city lamps began to twinkle,
making the darkness murkier by their inadequacy, there arose from the
twisting ways of Pera, Galata and Stamboul the night howling of thirty
thousand dogs.

At length Martin held up the dial of his watch to the uncertain light.

"I must be off," he announced. "Jusseret is waiting at the Pera Palace.
Don't fail us at seven-thirty."

The tireless features of Abdul Said _Bey_ once more shaped themselves
into a deliberate smile. "Of a surety, _Effendi_. May your virtues ever
find favor in the sight of Allah."

For a moment the pig-like eyes followed the well-knit figure of the
Englishman as it went swinging along the street. Then the Turk turned
and lost himself in the darkness.

The Pera Palace Hotel stands in the European quarter of the town. To its
doors your steps are guided by a trail of shop signs in English, French,
German and Greek, among which appear only occasional characters in the
native Arabic.

Almost immediately after Cara, Pagratide and Benton had seated
themselves in the dining-room that evening, Arab servants secluded a
corner table, close to their own, behind _mushrab