were following close
after them. As my horse nodded to rest, I heard a sort of panting behind
me, and turned and saw that a tawny youth from the village had overtaken
me--a true remnant and representative of his ancestress the Witch--a
galvanised scurvy, wrought into the human shape and garnished with
ophthalmia and leprous scars--an airy creature with an invisible
shirt-front that reached below the pit of his stomach, and no other
clothing to speak of except a tobacco-pouch, an ammunition-pocket, and
a venerable gun, which was long enough to club any game with that came
within shooting distance, but far from efficient as an article of dress.

I thought to myself, "Now this disease with a human heart in it is going
to shoot me." I smiled in derision at the idea of a Bedouin daring to
touch off his great-grandfather's rusty gun and getting his head blown
off for his pains. But then it occurred to me, in simple school-boy
language, "Suppose he should take deliberate aim and 'haul off' and
fetch me with the butt-end of it?" There was wisdom in that view of
it, and I stopped to parley. I found he was only a friendly villain who
wanted a trifle of bucksheesh, and after begging what he could get in
that way, was perfectly willing to trade off everything he had for more.
I believe he would have parted with his last shirt for bucksheesh if he
had had one. He was smoking the "humbliest" pipe I ever saw--a dingy,
funnel-shaped, red-clay thing, streaked and grimed with oil and tears of
tobacco, and with all the different kinds of dirt there are, and thirty
per cent. of them peculiar and indigenous to Endor and perdition. And
rank? I never smelt anything like it. It withered a cactus that stood
lifting its prickly hands aloft beside the trail. It even woke up my
horse. I said I would take that. It cost me a franc, a Russian kopek, a
brass button, and a slate pencil; and my spendthrift lavishness so
won upon the son of the desert that he passed over his pouch of most
unspeakably villainous tobacco to me as a free gift. What a pipe it was,
to be sure! It had a rude brass-wire cover to it, and a little coarse
iron chain suspended from the bowl, with an iron splinter attached to
loosen up the tobacco and pick your teeth with. The stem looked like the
half of a slender walking-stick with the bark on.

I felt that this pipe had belonged to the original Witch of Endor as
soon as I saw it; and as soon as I smelt it, I knew it. Moreover, I