Some months after this, I met him again under arrest, in the midst of the guards and officers of the police, and he said to them, “Seize yonder man.”  So they laid hands on me and carried me to the chief of the police, who said, “What hast thou to do with this fellow?” The thief turned to me and looking a long while in my face, said, “Who took this man?” Quoth the officers, “Thou badest us take him; so we took him.”  And he said, “I seek refuge with God!  I know not this man, nor knoweth he me; and I said not that to you but of a man other than this.”  So they released me, and awhile afterward the thief met me in the street and saluted me, saying, “O my lord, fright for fright!  Hadst thou taken aught from me, thou hadst had a part in the calamity."[FN#146] And I said to him, “God [judge] between thee and me!” And this is what I have to tell’

Then came forward the thirteenth officer and said, ’I will tell you a story that a man of my friends told me. (Quoth he)

The thirteenth officer’s story.

I went out one night to the house of one of my friends and when it was the middle of the night, I sallied forth alone [to go home].  When I came into the road, I espied a sort of thieves and they saw me, whereupon my spittle dried up; but I feigned myself drunken and staggered from side to side, crying out and saying, “I am drunken.”  And I went up to the walls right and left and made as if I saw not the thieves, who followed me till I reached my house and knocked at the door, when they went away.

Some days after this, as I stood at the door of my house, there came up to me a young man, with a chain about his neck and with him a trooper, and he said to me, “O my lord, charity for the love of God!” Quoth I, “God open!"[FN#147] and he looked at me a long while and said, “That which thou shouldst give me would not come to the value of thy turban or thy waistcloth or what not else of thy raiment, to say nothing of the gold and the silver that was about thee.”  “How so?” asked I, and he said, “On such a night, when thou fellest into peril and the thieves would have stripped thee, I was with them and said to them, ’Yonder man is my lord and my master who reared me.’  So was I the cause of thy deliverance and thus I saved thee from them.”  When I heard this, I said to him, “Stop;” and entering my house, brought him that which God the Most High made easy [to me].[FN#148] So he went his way.  And this is my story.’

Then came forward the fourteenth officer and said, ’Know that the story I have to tell is pleasanter and more extraordinary than this; and it is as follows.

The fourteenth officer’s story.

Before I entered this corporation,[FN#149] I had a draper’s shop and there used to come to me a man whom I knew not, save by his face, and I would give him what he sought and have patience with him, till he could pay me.  One day, I foregathered with certain of my friends and we sat down to drink.  So we drank and made merry and played at Tab;[FN#150] and we made one of us Vizier and another Sultan and a third headsman.