“If I tell you?”

“I’m not the boss.  But I’ll see him about it.  Come on—­who’s your agent?”

“Scharnhoff.”

Grim whistled.  That he did not believe, I was almost certain, but he whistled as if totally new trains of thought had suddenly revealed themselves amid a maze of memories.

“You shall speak to the boss,” he said after a while.

I fell asleep then, wedged uncomfortably between two men’s legs, wakened at intervals by the noisy pleading of Mahommed ben Hamza and his men for what they called their rights in the matter of Abdul Ali’s wallet.  They were still arguing the point when we ran on the beach near Jericho, where a patrol of incredulous Sikhs pounced on us and wanted to arrest Ahmed and Anazeh’s wounded men.  Grim had an awful time convincing them that he was a British officer.  In the end we only settled it by tramping about four miles to a guard-house, where a captain in uniform gave us breakfast and telephoned for a commisariat lorry.

It was late in the afternoon when we reached Jerusalem and got the wounded into hospital.  By the time Grim had changed into uniform and put courtplaster where his eyebrows should have been, and he, Abdul Ali and I had driven in an official Ford up the Mount of Olives to OETA, the sun was not far over the skyline.

Grim had telephoned, so the Administrator was waiting for us.  Grim went straight in.  It was twenty minutes before we two were summoned into his private room, where he sat behind the desk exactly as we had left him the other morning.  He looked as if he had not moved meanwhile.  Everything was exactly in its place—­ even the vase, covering the white spot on the varnish.  There was the same arrangement of too many flowers, in a vase too small to hold them.

“Allow me to present Sheikh Abdul Ali of Damascus,” said Grim.

The Administrator bowed rather elaborately, perhaps to hide the twinkle in his eyes.  He didn’t scowl.  He didn’t look tyrannical.  So Abdul Ali opened on him, with all bow guns.

“I protest!  I am a French subject.  I have been submitted to violence, outrage, indignity!  I have been seized on foreign soil, and brought here by force against all international law!  I shall claim exemplary damages!  I demand apology and satisfaction!”

Sir Louis raised his eyebrows and looked straight at Grim without even cracking a smile.

“Is this true, Major Grim?”

“Afraid it is, sir.”

“Scandalous!  Perfectly scandalous!  And were you a witness to all this?” he asked, looking at me as if I might well be the cause of it all.

I admitted having seen the greater part of it.

“And you didn’t protest?  What’s the world coming to?  I see you’ve lost a little skin yourself.  I hope you’ve not been breaking bounds and fighting?”

“He is a most impertinent man!” said Abdul Ali, trying to take his cue, and glowering at me.  “He posed as a person interested in a school for El-Kerak, and afterward helped capture me by a trick!”