“Come back!  Don’t let’s be fools!” I insisted.  “I never saw a more obvious effort to start trouble in my life!  It’s a trap!  Keep out of it!”

“Sure enough,” Will admitted.  “You’re right!”

He returned into the tent and the Greeks, perhaps supposing he went for weapons, retreated, continuing to shout abuse at Brown who, between a yearning to get drunk and sorrow for his stolen cattle, was growing tearful.

“They got here first,” I argued.  “They’ve had time to tell their own story.  That may account for our cold reception by the Germans.  He says they’re under arrest.  That may be true, or it may be a trick.  It’s perfectly obvious Coutlass wanted to start a fight, and I’m dead sure he wasn’t taking such a chance as it seemed.  Who wants to look behind the cactus hedge and see whether he has friends in ambush?”

“Drunkard Brown is on the town—­on the town—­on the town!” roared Coutlass and his friends from not very far away.

“Oh, let me go and have a crack at ’em!” begged Brown.  “I tell you I don’t care about jail!  I don’t care if I do get killed!”

Fred kept a restraining hand on him.  Will left the tent and walked straight for the gap in the cactus hedge by which we had entered the enclosure.  It was only twenty yards away.

Once through the gap he glanced swiftly to right and left—­laughed—­and came back again.

“Only six of ’em!” he grinned.  “Six full-sized Nubians in uniform, with army boots on, no bayonets or rifles, but good big sticks and handcuffs!  If we’d touched those Greeks they’d have jumped the fence and stretched us out!  What the devil d’you suppose they want us in jail for?”

“D’you suppose they think,” I said, “that if they had us in jail in this God-forsaken place we’d divulge the secret of Tip-poo’s ivory?”

“Why don’t we tell ’em the secret!” suggested Will, and that seemed such a good idea that we laughed ourselves back into good temper—­even Brown, who had no notion whether we knew the secret, being perfectly sure we would not be such fools as to tell the true whereabouts of the hoard in any case.

“I want to get even with all Africa!” he grumbled.  “I want to make trouble that’ll last!  I’d start a war this minute if I knew how!  If it weren’t for those bloody Greeks laughing at me I’d get more drunk to-night than any ten men in the world ever were before in history!  Yes, sir!  And my name’s Brown of Lumbwa to prove I mean what I say!”

After a while, seeing that no trouble was likely, the Nubian soldiers came out of ambush and marched away.  We ate supper.  The Greeks and the Goanese subsided into temporary quiet, and our own boys, squatting by a fire they had placed so that they could watch the Greeks’ encampment, began bumming a native song.  Their song reminded Fred of Will’s earlier suggestion, and he unclasped the concertina.

Then for three-quarters of an hour he played, and we sang all the tunes we knew least likely to make Germans happy, repeating The Marseillaise and Rule Britannia again and again in pious hope that at least a few bars might reach to the commandant’s house on the hill.