He turned on the swarm of boys, who still yelled and struggled about our legs.

“Imshi!* Voetsak!** Enenda zako!*** Kuma nina, wewe!**** In a minute he had them all scattering, for only innocence and inexperience attract the preying youth of Zanzibar.  “Now, gentlemen, my name is Coutlass—­Georges Coutlass.  Have a drink with me, and let me tell you something.”

-----------------
* Imshi (Arabic), get to hell out of here!
** Voetsak (Cape Dutch), ditto.
*** Enenda zako (Kiswahill), ditto.
**** Kuma nina (Kiswahill).  An opprobrious, and perhaps the commonest
expletive In the language, amounting to a request for details of the
objurgee’s female ancestry.   By no means for use in drawing-rooms.
------------------

He was tall, dark skinned, athletic, and roguish-looking even for the brand of Greek one meets with south of the Levant—­dressed in khaki, with an American cowboy hat—­his fingers nearly black with cigarette juice —­his hands unusually horny for that climate—­and his hair clipped so short that it showed the bumps of avarice and other things, said to reside below the hat-band to the rear.  Yet a plausible, companionable-seeming man.  And Zanzibar confers democratic privilege, as well as fevers; impartiality hovers in the atmosphere as well as smells, and we neither of us dreamed of hesitating, but followed him back into the bar—­a wide, low-ceilinged room whose beams were two feet thick of blackened, polished hard wood.  There we sat one each side of him in cane armchairs.  He ordered the drinks, and paid for them.

“First I will tell you who I am,” he said, when be had swallowed a foot-long whisky peg and wiped his lips with his coat sleeve.  “I never boast.  I don’t need to!  I am Georges Coutlass!  I learned that you have an English lord among your party, and said I to myself ’Aha!  There is a man who will appreciate me, who am a citizen of three lands!’ Which of you gentlemen is the lord?”

“How can you be a citizen of three countries?” Fred countered.

“Of Greece, for I was born in Greece.  I have fought Turks.  Ah!  I have bled for Greece.  I have spilt my blood in many lands, but the best was for my motherland!—­Of England, for I became naturalized.  By bloody-hell-and-Waterloo, but I admire the English!  They have guts, those English, and I am one of them!  By the great horn spoon, yes, I became an Englishman at Bow Street one Monday morning, price Five Pounds.  I was lined up with the drunks and pick-pockets, and by Jumbo the magistrate mistook me for a thief!  He would have given me six months without the option in another minute, but I had the good luck to remember how much money I had paid my witnesses.  The thought of paying that for nothing—­worse than nothing, for six months in jail!—­in an English jail!—­pick oakum!—­eat skilly!—­that thought brought me to my senses.  ‘By Gassharamminy,’ I said, ’I may be mad, but I’m sober!  If it’s a crime to desire to be English, then