The dragoman laughed—­not at the facetiousness of the simile, for verily, that guide or that courier or that dragoman never yet lived upon earth who had in him the faintest appreciation of a joke, even though that joke were so broad and so ponderous that if it fell on him it would flatten him out like a postage stamp—­the dragoman laughed, and then, emboldened by some thought that was in his brain, no doubt, proceeded to extremities and winked.

In straits like these, when a man laughs, it is encouraging when he winks, it is positively reassuring.  He finally intimated that one guard would be sufficient to protect us, but that that one was an absolute necessity.  It was because of the moral weight his awful panoply would have with the Bedouins.  Then I said we didn’t want any guard at all.  If one fantastic vagabond could protect eight armed Christians and a pack of Arab servants from all harm, surely that detachment could protect themselves.  He shook his head doubtfully.  Then I said, just think of how it looks—­think of how it would read, to self-reliant Americans, that we went sneaking through this deserted wilderness under the protection of this masquerading Arab, who would break his neck getting out of the country if a man that was a man ever started after him.  It was a mean, low, degrading position.  Why were we ever told to bring navy revolvers with us if we had to be protected at last by this infamous star-spangled scum of the desert?  These appeals were vain—­the dragoman only smiled and shook his head.

I rode to the front and struck up an acquaintance with King Solomon-in-all-his-glory, and got him to show me his lingering eternity of a gun.  It had a rusty flint lock; it was ringed and barred and plated with silver from end to end, but it was as desperately out of the perpendicular as are the billiard cues of ’49 that one finds yet in service in the ancient mining camps of California.  The muzzle was eaten by the rust of centuries into a ragged filigree-work, like the end of a burnt-out stove-pipe.  I shut one eye and peered within—­it was flaked with iron rust like an old steamboat boiler.  I borrowed the ponderous pistols and snapped them.  They were rusty inside, too—­had not been loaded for a generation.  I went back, full of encouragement, and reported to the guide, and asked him to discharge this dismantled fortress.  It came out, then.  This fellow was a retainer of the Sheik of Tiberias.  He was a source of Government revenue.  He was to the Empire of Tiberias what the customs are to America.  The Sheik imposed guards upon travelers and charged them for it.  It is a lucrative source of emolument, and sometimes brings into the national treasury as much as thirty-five or forty dollars a year.

I knew the warrior’s secret now; I knew the hollow vanity of his rusty trumpery, and despised his asinine complacency.  I told on him, and with reckless daring the cavalcade straight ahead into the perilous solitudes of the desert, and scorned his frantic warnings of the mutilation and death that hovered about them on every side.