So toothache was selected as an alibi, and Jeremy wrapped his jaw in a towel, after jabbing his cheek with a pin so as to remember on which side the pain should be.  But it was artifice wasted, for Grim had turned a better trick.  He had found an Australian doctor in the hospital for Sikhs—­the only other Australian in Jerusalem just then—­ and brought him cooee-ing upstairs in a way that proved he knew the whole story already.

The autopsy, as he called it, was a riot.  We didn’t talk of anything but fights at Gaza—­the surprise at Nazareth, when the German General Staff fled up the road on foot in its pyjamas—­the three-day scrap at Nebi Samwil, when Australians and Turks took and retook the same hill half a dozen times, and parched enemies took turns drinking from one flask while the shells of both sides burst above them.  It seems to have been almost like old-fashioned war in Palestine from their account of it, either side conceding that the other played the game.

When they had thrashed the whole campaign over from start to finish, making maps on my bed with hair brushes, razors and things, they got to talking of Australia; and that was all about fighting too:  dog fights, fist fights between bullockies on the long road from Northern Queensland, riots in Perth when the pearlers came in off the Barrier Reef to spend their pay, rows in the big shearing sheds when the Union men objected to unskilled labour—­you’d have thought Australia was one big battlefield, with nothing else but fights worth talking of from dawn till dark.

The doctor was one of those tightly-knit, dark-complexioned little men with large freckles and brown eyes, who surprise you with a mixture of intense domestic virtue and a capacity, that shouldn’t mix with it at all, for turning up in all the unexpected places.  You meet his sort everywhere, and they always have a wife along, who worships them and makes a home out of tin cans and packing-cases that would put the stay-at-home housekeepers to shame.  They always have a picture on the wall of cows standing knee-deep in the water, and no matter what their circumstances are, there’s always something in reserve, for guests, offered frankly without apology.  Never hesitate with those folk, but don’t let them go too far, for they’ll beggar themselves to help you in a tight place, if you’ll let them.  Ticknor his name was.  He’s a good man.

“Say, Grim, there’s a case in the Sikh hospital that ought to interest you,” he said at last.  “Fellow from Damascus—­Arab—­one of Feisul’s crowd.  He wouldn’t let them take him to the Zionist hospital—­swore a Jew knifed him and that the others would finish the job if they got half a chance.  They’d have been arguing yet, and he dead and buried, if I hadn’t gone shopping with Mabel.  She saw the crowd first (I was in Noureddin’s store) and jabbed her way in with her umbrella—­she yelled to me and I bucked the line.