“I’m going to show it to Feisul.”

“Good!  I, too, am on my way to see Feisul.  Perhaps the two of us together can convince him what is best.”

“If we two first agree,” Grim answered with a dry smile.

“Do you agree that two and two make four?  This is just as simple, Jimgrim.  Feisul cannot contend with the French.  The financiers have spread their net for Syria, Feisul has no artillery worth speaking of—­ no gas—­no masks against gas, and the French have plenty of everything except money.  Syria has been undermined by propaganda and corruption.  Let Feisul go to British territory and thence to Europe, where his friends may have a chance to work for him.  The British will give him Mesopotamia, and after that it will be up to us Arabs to prove we are a nation.  That is my argument.  Are we agreed?”

“If that’s your plan, Hadad, I’m with you!” Grim answered.

“Then I also am with you!  Let us shake hands.”

“Shwai shwai!” (Go slow!) said Grim.  “Better join up with me in Damascus.  There are six men in the car ahead who’ll try to murder us all presently.  They’ve got a letter that they think is that one.  The minute they find out we’ve fooled them there’ll be ructions.”

“I am good at ructions!” Hadad answered.

“My friend Narayan Singh is forward watching them,” said Grim.  “What they’ll probably try when they make the discovery will be to have the lot of us arrested at some wayside station.  I propose to forestall them.”

“I am good at forestalling!” said Hadad.

“Then don’t you forestall me!” laughed Jeremy.  “The fellow with a face like a pig’s stern is Yussuf Dakmar, and he’s my special preserve.”

“I am a good Moslem.  I refuse to lay hand on pig,” said Hadad, smiling.

We discussed Feisul and the Arab cause.

“Oh, if we had Lawrence with us!” exclaimed Hadad excitedly at last.  “A little, little man—­hardly any larger than Mrs. Ticknor—­but a David against Goliath!  And would you believe it?—­there is an idiotic rumour that Lawrence has returned and is hiding in Damascus!  The French are really disturbed about it.  They have cabled their Foreign Office and received an official denial of the rumour; but official denials carry no weight nowadays.  Out of ten Frenchmen in Syria, five believe that Lawrence is with Feisul and if they can catch him he will get short shrift.  But, oh, Jimgrim—­oh, if it were true!  Wallahi!”

Grim didn’t answer, but I saw him look long at Jeremy, and then for about thirty seconds steadily at Mabel Ticknor.  After that he stared out of the window for a long time, not even moving his head when a crowd of Bedouins galloped to within fifty yards of the train and volleyed at it from horseback “merely out of devilment,” as Hadad hastened to assure us.

We were winding up the Lebanon Valley by that time.  Carpets of flowers; green grass; waterfalls; a thatched hut to the twenty square miles, with a scattering of mean black tents between; every stone building in ruins; goats where fat kine ought to be; and a more or less modern railway screeching across the landscape, short of fuel and oil.  That’s Lebanon.