“There are two things that have stuck in my memory that Lord Salisbury used to say when I was an Eton boy, spending a holiday at Hatfield House,” said Monty.  “One was, Never talk fight unless you mean fight; then fight, don’t talk.  The other was, Always study the largest maps.”

“Who’s talking fight?” demanded Fred.

Monty ignored him.  “Even this map isn’t big enough to give a real idea of distances, but it helps.  You see, there’s no railway beyond Victoria Nyanza.  Anything at all might happen in those great spaces beyond Uganda.  Borderlands are quarrel-grounds.  I should say the junction of British, Belgian, and German territory where Arab loot lies buried is the last place to dally in unarmed.  You fellows ’ud better scour Zanzibar in the morning for the best guns to be had here.”

So I went to bed at midnight with that added stuff for building dreams.  He who has bought guns remembers with a thrill; he who has not, has in store for him the most delightful hours of life.  May he fall, as our lot was, on a gunsmith who has mended hammerlocks for Arabs, and who loves rifles as some greater rascals love a woman or a horse.

We all four strolled next morning, clad in the khaki reachmedowns that a Goanese “universal provider” told us were the “latest thing,” into a den between a camel stable and an even mustier-smelling home of gloom, where oxen tied nose-to-tail went round and round, grinding out semsem everlastingly while a lean Swahili sang to them.  When he ceased, they stopped.  When he sang, they all began again.

In a bottle-shaped room at the end of a passage squeezed between those two centers of commerce sat the owner of the gun-store, part Arab, part Italian, part Englishman, apparently older than sin itself, toothless, except for one yellow fang that lay like an ornament over his lower lip, and able to smile more winningly than any siren of the sidewalk.  Evidently he shaved at intervals, for white stubble stood out a third of an inch all over his wrinkled face.  The upper part of his head was utterly bald, slippery, shiny, smooth, and adorned by an absurd, round Indian cap, too small, that would not stay in place and had to be hitched at intervals.

He said his name was Captain Thomas Cook, and the license to sell firearms framed on the mud-brick wall bore him witness. (May he live forever under any name he chooses!)

“Goons?” he said.  “Goons?  You gentlemen want goons?  I have the goon what settled the hash of Sayed bin Mohammed—­here it be.  This other one’s the rifle—­see the nicks on her butt!—­that Kamarajes the Greek used.  See ’em—­Arab goons—­slaver goons—­smooth-bore elephant goons—­fours, eights, twelves—­Martinis—­them’s the lot that was reekin’ red-hot, days on end, in the last Arab war on the Congo, considerable used up but goin’ cheap;—­then here’s Mausers (he pronounced it “Morsers")—­ old-style, same as used in 1870—­good goons