He knew what had happened before he lost consciousness, for he tried to give the alarm to his friends.  He lay on the floor opening and shutting his mouth, and I think he believed he was shouting for help; but after a minute or two you could hardly detect his breathing, and his face changed colour as if he had been poisoned.

Grim didn’t even trouble to get out of bed, but listened without comment to my version of Narayan Singh’s report, and Jeremy went back to sleep chuckling; so I held a silent wake over Yussuf Dakmar, keeping some more of the doped whisky ready in case he should look like recovering too soon.  I even searched him, finding nothing worthy of note, except that he had remarkably little money.  I expect the poor devil was a penny ante villain scheming for a thousand-dollar jackpot.  I felt really sorry for him and turned him over with my boot to let him breathe better.

A little before dawn I awakened Grim and Jeremy and we left the room quietly after I had scratched on the closet door with my fingernails.  Pausing outside to listen, we heard the closet door being opened stealthily from the far side.  I caught Grim’s eye, thinking he would smile back, but he looked as deadly serious as I have ever seen him.

“You made a bad break that time,” he said when we had gone downstairs.  “Never give away information unless you’re getting a return for it!  If you’d left Yussuf Dakmar to scratch that door after he recovered consciousness, he’d have invented a pack of lies to tell his friends, and they’d have been no wiser than before.  Now they’ll know he never scratched it.  They’ll deduce, unless they’re lunatics, that someone overheard their conference last night and knew the signal.  That’ll make them desperate.  They’ll waste no more time on finesse.  They’ll use violence at the first chance after the train leaves Haifa.”

“Rammy’s like me; he hates not to have an audience for his tricks,” put in Jeremy by way of consolation.

“We’ve got to stage a new play, that’s all,” said Grim.  “I’d have the lot of them arrested, but all the good that would do would be to inform the man higher up, who’d tip off another gang by wire to wait for us over the border.  Say, suppose we all three bear this in mind:  No play to the gallery!  That’s where secret service differs from other business.  Applause means failure.  The better the work you do, the less you can afford to admit you did it.  You mustn’t even smile at a man you’ve scored off.  Half the game is to leave him guessing who it was that tripped him up.  The safest course is to see that someone else gets credit for everything you do.”

“Consume your own smoke, eh?” suggested Jeremy.

“That and more,” Grim answered.  “You’ve got to work like Bell for what’ll do you no good, because the moment it brings you recognition it destroys your usefulness.  You mayn’t even amuse yourself; you have to let the game amuse you, without turning one trick for the sake of an extra smile; most of the humor comes in anyhow, from knowing more than the other fellow thinks you do.  The more a man lies the less you want to contradict him, because if you do he’ll know that you know he’s lying and that’s giving away information, which is the unforgivable sin.”