It was not until they had debouched (as Crothers termed it) to their half-right front and had taken to a narrow one-man track that ran below the wall that any over attention was paid them.  Suddenly a hook-nosed Asiatic gentleman emerged through the once-was gateway—­ a picture of a Bible shepherd but for the long-barreled gun he carried instead of crook—­a brown shadow against brown masonry.  He challenged them in Arabic, and Curley Crothers answered him in Queen Victoria’s English that all was well.

“Everything in the garden’s lovely!” he asserted, in a deep-sea sing-song.  “How’s yourself?”

The man repeated whatever he had said before, this time with a gesture of impatience.

“Friend!” roared Byng and Curley both together.  And the bull terrier took the joint yell for a war cry, or a bunting call, or possibly the herald’s overture that summons bull pups to Valhalla.  He was bred right and British Navy trained and his was not to reason why.  He waited for no second invitation, but lit out from Byng’s arms like a streak—­a whip-tail, snow-white streak—­for where the Arab’s hard lean legs shone shiny-brown below his fluttering brown raiment.

“Come back, there!” yelled both keepers in excited unison, but they called too late.

Each grabbed for the chain too late.  Their heads and shoulders cannoned and they fell together on the hot, dirty sand while Scamp and the Arab made each other’s intimate acquaintance in a whirl of ripping cloth and legs and teeth and blasphemy.

That in itself was bad enough, and good enough excuse if such were wanted for war between the Shadow of God Upon Earth and England’s distant Queen; but there was worse to follow.

One does not laugh, between certain parallels, unless the ultimate degree of insult is intended.  And Curley Crothers and Joe Byng did laugh.  They held their ribs and laughed until their muscles ached and their strong men’s strength oozed out of them.

They were laughing when they grabbed the dog at last and pulled him off.  They laughed as they set the Arab on his feet and gave him back his gun; and they laughed at him with Christian and mannerly good grace when he spat at them in awful frenzy until the spittle matted in his beard.  And, being gentlemen after a fashion quite their own, they smilingly apologized.

Arabia lies in the middle of the zone where laughter is not wisdom.  And a smile lies midway in the measure of a laugh.  A laugh might be unintentional.  A smile must be deliberate.  And the Arab’s spittle was run dry.  Creed, custom, law of tooth for tooth and the thought of half a hundred co-religionists all watching him from crannies in the wall combined to make him shoot, since further means of showing malice were denied him; and he raised the long butt to his shoulder with meaning that was unmistakable.

And so, with sorrow that the East should be so lacking in good fellowship, but with the ready instinct of men who have been trained for war, they closed with him from two directions, swiftly, bull-dog-wise, and took his gun away.  And how could even an able seaman help the dog’s taking a share in the game again?