Will was standing.  Nothing but Monty’s voice prevented blows.  He rapped out a string of sudden rhetoric in the Rajput’s own guttural tongue, and Rustum Khan drew back four paces.

“Send him back, Colonel sahib!” he urged.  “Send that one back!  He and Umm Kulsum will be the death of us!”

Fred went off into a peal of laughter that did nothing to calm the Rajput’s ruffled temper.

“Who was Umm Kulsum?” I asked him, divining the cause.

“The most immoral hag in Asian legend!  The aggregated essence of all female evil personified in one procuress!”

“Say, I’ll have to teach that gink—­”

Monty got up and stood between them, but it was a new alarm that prevented blows.  A fist-blow in the Rajput’s face would have meant a blood-feud that nothing less than a man’s life could settle, and Monty looked worried.  There came a new thundering on the door that brought everybody to his feet as if murder were the least of the charges against us.  Only Kagig appeared at ease and unconcerned.

“Open to them!” he shouted, and resumed his pacing to and fro.

Our Armenian servants ran to the door, and in a minute returned to say that fifty mounted men from Zeitoon were drawn up outside.  Kagig gave a curt laugh and strode across to us.

“I said you Eenglis sportmen should see good sport.”

Monty nodded, with a hand held out behind him to warn us to keep still.

“I said you shall shoot many pigs!”

“Lead on, then.”

“Turks are pigs!”

Monty dd not answer.  To have disagreed would have been like flapping a red cloth at a tiger.  Yet to have agreed with him at once might have made him jump to false conclusions.  The consul’s last words to us had been insistent on the unwisdom of posing as anything but hunters, legitimately entitled to protection from the Turkish government.

“I would like you gentlemen for allies!”

“You are our servant at present.”

“Would you think of holding me to that?” demanded Kagig with a gesture of extreme irritation.  It is only the West that can joke at itself in the face of crisis.

“If not to that,” said Monty blandly, “then what agreements do you keep?”

Kagig saw the point.  He drew a deep impatient breath and drove it out again hissing through his teeth.  Then he took grim hold of himself.

“Effendi,” he said, addressing himself to Monty, but including all of us with eyes that seemed to search our hearts, “you are a lord, a friend of the King of Eengland.  If I were less than a man of my word I could make you prisoner and oblige your friend the King of Eengland to squeeze these cursed Turks!”

Rustum Khan heard what he said, and made noise enough drawing his saber to be heard outside the kahveh, but Kagig did not turn his head.  Three gipsies attended to Rustum Khan, slipping between him and their master, and our four Zeitoonli servants cautiously approached the Rajput from behind.