“Good enough!” laughed Grim.  “You’ll do.”

“Yes, I think he’ll do,” agreed Templeton.

But I took no notice.  I had seen too many games lost and won with the last card.  Templeton looked down at Suliman: 

“Tell him the game’s over.  He may talk now.”

“Mafish mukhkh!” [No brains!] the boy answered, grinning and tapping his own forehead.  “Magnoon!” [Mad!]

“I think I can trust them both,” said Grim, smiling in my direction.  “All right, old man; time out!  If you’d spoken once there’d have been nothing more between you and a life of safety and respectability!”

“Whereas,” said Templeton, “you may now be unsafe and an outlaw and enjoy yourself!  Are you sure they haven’t marked him?” he asked Grim.

“Sure!  Why should they suspect a tourist?  But I’ve taken precautions.  Word is on the way to the hotel to forward all his mail to Jaffa until further notice.”  He laughed at me again.  “I hope you’re not expecting important letters!”

Suliman had evidently been well schooled in advance, for at a nod from Grim he came over and took my hand, as if I were blind in addition to the other supposed infirmities.  He led me out by a back-door, across a yard into an alley, which we followed as far as a main road and then turned toward the Jaffa Gate.  Looking back once I saw Grim in his Shereefian uniform striding along behind us; but where the road forked he took the other turning.

There is contentment in walking disguised through crowded streets, even when you are in tow of eight-year-old iniquity that regards you as a lump of baggage to be pushed this and that way.  Suliman plainly considered me a rank outsider, only admitted into the game on sufferance.  Having said I was “magnoon” he lived up to the assertion, and warned people to make way for me if they did not want to be bitten and go mad, too; so as a general rule I received a pretty wide berth.  But it was fun, in spite of Suliman.  It was like seeing the world through a peep-hole.  Men and women you knew went by without suspecting they were recognized, and in a puzzling sort of way the world, that had been your world yesterday, seemed now to belong wholly to other people, while you lived in a new sphere of your own.

We had to go slowly as we approached the Jaffa Gate, for the crowd was dense there, and a line of Sikhs was drawn across the gap where the street passes through the city wall.  It was the gap the Turks once made by tearing down the wall to let the Kaiser through, when he made that famous meek and humble pilgrimage of his.  The Sikhs were searching all comers for weapons, and we had to wait our turn.

Outside the gate, on the left-hand as you faced it, was the usual line of boot-blacks—­the only cheap thing left in Jerusalem—­a motley two dozen of ex-Turkish soldiers, recently fighting the British gamely in the last ditch, and now blacking their boots with equal gusto, for rather higher pay.  Some of them still wore Turkish uniforms.  Two or three were redheaded and blue-eyed, and almost certainly descended from Scotch crusaders. (The whole wide world bears witness that when the Scots went soldiering they were efficient in more ways than one.)