They forgot the dog.  The jail, for the moment, challenged all their waking senses, the olfactory by no means least.

“Can you see anything?” asked Byng.

Before Crothers could answer him, a snarl, then a yap, then a quick, determined growl gave warning of the terrier’s interest in something else than fleas.

He had been scratching himself peacefully a moment earlier; now, like a bower anchor taking charge, he ripped the chain through Byng’s hand and was off—­chin, back and tail in one straight, striving line—­ in full chase of a pariah.

The yellow cur yapped its agony of fear; the nearest hundred and odd mangy monsters of the gutter took up the chorus; within five seconds of the start there was the Puncher’s mascot racing after one abominable scavenger, and after him in just as hot pursuit there raced the whole street-cleaning force of Adra—­tongues out, eyes blazing, and their mean thin barks all working overtime.

“Good-by, Scamp!” groaned Byng, estimating rapidly.

“Not yet it ain’t!” said Crothers, grabbing Byng’s arm and nearly tearing out the muscles.

It was a crude way of rousing Byng’s latent speed, both of thought and movement, but it worked.  Before Joe could swear, even, Crothers was off like the wind, with Joe after him, using the string of oaths he had meant for Crothers on the sand that gave under him and made him stumble at every other stride.

Adra turned out, as a colony of prairie dogs might from planless burrows; only these had more venom in their bite than prairie dogs and came from structural instead of natural, from flea-bepeppered instead of grass-grown dirt.  Man, woman and child—­the grown men armed, the women veiled in dirt-brown, some of them, and some (mostly the better-looking) unveiled and unashamed, the little children mostly naked and colored with all the human hues there are—­raced, yelling, through a swarm of flies in hot pursuit.  Never since Shem’s great-grandson gat the Arab race was there a procession like it.

Behind its mud-and-Masonry decrepit wall that guards only the seaward side, Adra straggles quite a distance desertward; and there are winding streets enough to hide an army in, provided that the army did not mind the fleas.  Scamp, view-halloaing his utmost, led that most amazing hunt a quite considerable circuit before other men and dogs, arriving from a dozen different directions, set a limit to his unobstructed movement.

He knew what he was after, but they did not; they had come to see.  For a moment they seemed to think that Scamp was the object of the chase, and a dozen guns of a dozen different kinds and dates were aimed at him.

And then, as consciousness dawns on a man recovering from choloform, there swept over their lethargic Eastern brains the simultaneous idea that Curley Crothers and Joe Byng were the real quarry; and—­again like men recovering from chloroform—­they did not quite know what to do.  Should they slay, there was the Puncher to be reckoned with; and the Puncher’s port quick-firers could be seen commanding Adra by any man who cared to climb the wall.