his cause, and were not likely to impale themselves on bayonets to
encourage the others, as his more earnest adherents thought it a
privilege to do. At the same time they were Mohammedans, and to kill an
unbeliever must be always a meritorious action in their eyes. So it was
a pleasure to them to pepper the Christians a bit, when occasion
offered, not to mention that any sort of a fight was attractive to such
a warlike race. But still there was no venom in their hostility; we
were enemies, of course, but enemies who might any day become friends;
and Grady's prisoner did not think it necessarily behoved him to sulk,
refuse food, commit suicide, or, which was much the same thing, attempt
to escape. So he was soon chatting freely with the natives, of whom
there were a good many, for the camels conveying the invalids were led
and tended by them. It stands to reason that all he said about his own
tribe and others, and the number of the Mahdi's followers, and the
distribution of his forces, could not be accepted as implicitly correct.
For, in the first place, he most likely had no accurate knowledge on
many of these and similar points; and in the next place, if he had, he
might more than possibly wish to mislead, rather than afford useful
information.

But after a certain amount of practice an officer with a head on his
shoulders learns how to sift the reports gathered from spies, deserters,
prisoners, and peasants, and to get a few grains of valuable fact out of
bushels of chaff. So the chief interpreter went to work, and translated
much useless and some practical talk.

The most interesting account he had to give could not be called useful,
however, because it referred to past events, and these were already
fully reported; but the present party had not heard them. It was
concerning the death of Colonel Stewart, the only English companion
Gordon had for so long, and of which the man professed to have been a
witness in the October of 1884. The following was the Arab's account,
transcribed from the note-book of Sergeant Barton, who could take things
down in shorthand, when men spoke slowly and deliberately, or with the
delay, as in the present instance, of an interpreter:--

"When Gordon Pasha knew that there was no hope, and that Khartoum must
fall, because, though he could hold his own against the enemy without,
treason in the heart of the place was a thing against which he was
powerless, and he knew, though no one