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 chloroform,
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.

Besides, an Arab's hospitality is proverbial. He very seldom kills a
visitor on sight.

On the other hand a man, and particularly a British sailor, who runs
has reason, as a rule. Therefore these two men were evidently guilty.
Therefore they must not escape. In five seconds the affair had changed
from a spectacular amusement, with Adra's population in the role of
super-heated audience, to a hunt of Crothers and Joe Byng.

Within ten seconds each of the sailors lay with his face pressed hard
into the sand and at least a dozen Arabs sitting on him. Scamp--utterly
forgotten now by all except the sailors--still behind the one stray
pariah and ahead of all the rest but beginning to appreciate the fact
that he was hunted, and beginning to feel spent--raced on, took three
sharp turns in close succession, and was gathered all unwilling in the
arms of an enormous black man who snatched him from the very teeth
of the following pack and dis