ized him. Wherefore, it's up to them to see that I never get a
chance to go before a grand jury."

"You sit down on the floor," said Adair. He had found a cigarette and
was crimping the end of it. "Have you a fraction of an idea that we are
going to allow you to make a Jonah of yourself for us? Sit down, I say!
Who's got a gun?"

Brissac had crept to a window and was reconnoitering the deserted camp
street and the commissary through a peephole in the drawn shade. As
Adair spoke, he sprang back, tripped Ford and fell with him, crying:

"Down! both of you!"

At the cry there was a shot from without, and a window on the exposed
side of the Nadia fell in shivers. There were yells of terror from the
cook's pantry, and the two negroes came crawling through the side
vestibule, their eyes like saucers and their teeth chattering. Ford
jumped up and turned off the Pintsch lights; and he was barely down
again when another shot broke a second window.

"Wouldn't that jolt you?" said Adair. "They are feeling for you with
both hands. What a heaven's pity it is that we haven't so much as a
potato popgun among us to talk back with. What did you see, Mr.
Brissac?"

"A crowd of them bunched on the commissary porch. One of them was
sighting a Winchester at the car when I got busy."

Adair was again lamenting the lack of arms when the negro porter
produced a pocket bulldog pistol of the cheap and uncertain sort.
"Y-y-y-yah you is, Mistuh Charles," he stuttered.

"Ah, Williams--concealed weapons? That is fifty dollars fine in your
native Tennessee, isn't it?" Then to Brissac: "Please go to the farther
window and mark down for me, Mr. Brissac. I don't like to have those
fellows do all the bluffing."

While the assistant was complying, a third bullet from the commissary
porch tore high through the car, smashing one of the gas globes. Adair
crawled to a broken window and the cheap revolver roared like an
overloaded musket.

"Good shot!" said Brissac, from his marking post. "You got one of them:
he's down and they're dragging him inside. Now they have all ducked to
cover."

"That settles any notion of a palaver and the pipe of peace, I guess,"
said Adair, as indifferently as if he had just brought down a clay
pigeon. "Prophesy, Stuart: what comes next?"

Ford shook his head.

"They can't quit now till they are sure I am permanently obliterated;
they have gone too far. They'll credit me with that shot of yours, and
they will tak