l make him shake in his boots for fear we
give not only the secret, but the boy, over to the tender mercies of the
authorities. For it's perfectly true that if the Government knew what a
trick had been played on them, they'd oust the false marabout in favour
of the rightful man, whoever he may be, clap the usurper into prison,
and make the child a kind of--er--ward in chancery, or whatever the
equivalent is in France. Oh, I can tell you, my boy, this idea is the
inspiration of a genius! The man will see we're making no idle threat,
that we can't carry out. He'll have to hand over the ladies, or he'll
spend some of his best years in prison, and never see his beloved boy
again."

"First we've got to catch our hare. But there Sabine could help us, if
we called him in."

"Yes. And we couldn't do better than have him with us, I think, Legs,
now we've come to this turn in the road."

"I agree so far. Still, let's keep Ben Halim's secret to ourselves. We
must have it to play with. I believe Sabine's a man to trust; but he's a
French officer; and a plot of that sort he might feel it his duty to
make known."

"All right. We'll keep back that part of the business. It isn't
necessary to give it away. But otherwise Sabine's the man for us. He's a
romantic sort of chap, not unlike me in that; it's what appealed to me
in him the minute we began to draw each other out. He'll snap at an
adventure to help a pretty girl even though he's never seen her; and he
knows the marabout's boy and the guardian-uncle. He was talking to me
about them this afternoon. Let's go and rout him out. I bet he'll have a
plan to propose."

"Rather cheek, to rouse him up in the middle of the night. We might
wait till morning, since I don't see that we can do anything useful
before."

"He only got in from seeing some friend in barracks, about one. He
doesn't look like a sleepy-head. Besides, if I'm not mistaken, I smell
his cigarettes. He's probably lying on his bed, reading a novel."

But Sabine was reading something to him far more interesting than any
novel written by the greatest genius of all ages; a collection of
Saidee's letters, which he invariably read through, from first to last,
every night before even trying to sleep.

The chance to be in the game of rescue was new life to him. He grudged
Saidee's handwriting to another man, even though he felt that, somehow,
she had hoped that he would see it, and that he would work with the
others. He l