“Howadji!” pleaded the Syrian shakily. "Howadji! You would not, in the untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that?  Not me, at anyhow?  Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old!  You would not forsook me, to starve myself! Aie!  Ohe!”

“Shut up that ungodly racket!” snapped Kirby, entering his tent and lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib’s wide-flung jaws.  “Shut up!  You’ll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to howling!  It’s bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the rest of the mess.”

“But, howadji!” pleaded Najib.

"Taman!" growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic word for the ending of all interviews.

“But I shall be beruinated, howadji!” tearfully insisted Najib.

Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make ready for bed.  If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then the little man’s brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

This was Kirby’s sole hope.  And he knew it.  Unless the fellaheen could be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should break the mine as well as the mine’s manager.  Kirby knew of no way to persuade the men.  The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean nothing to them.  All their brains could master at one time, without the aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double pay and half labour.

A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby.  In one hour his golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed.  At best he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to save his present contracts.  He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib’s muddled preachments to the point of sabotage.

The more he thought of it, the less possible did it seem to Kirby that Najib could undo the damage he had so blithely done.  Ordering the blubbering little fellow out of the tent and refusing to speak or listen further, Kirby went to bed.

Oddly enough, he slept.  There was nothing to worry about.  When a man’s job or fortune are imperilled sleep vanishes.  But after the catastrophe what sense is there in lying awake?  Depression and nervous fatigue threw Kirby into a troubled slumber.  Only once in the night was he roused.

Perhaps two hours before dawn he started up at sound of a humble scratching at the open door flap of his tent.  On the threshold cowered Najib.

“Furthermore, howadji,” came the Syrian’s woe-begone voice through the gloom, “could I borrow me a book if I shall use it with much carefulness?”