Now, what d'you mean by that exactly?" asked Joe Byng, his attitude
toward him almost entirely changed. A man who loses gamely is entitled
to respect if not to friendship.

Hassan Ah searched in the tattered shirt that he had laid aside, and
pulled out a folded piece of paper after a lot of fumbling. He opened it
gingerly, and holding one corner of it displayed the rest with evident
intention not to allow it out of his grasp.

"That says Ah'm English!" he explained.

"Oh!" said Crothers, rubbing an injured eye in order to see it better.
"Can you read, you black heathen?"

"No," said the pilot. "That says Ah'm English, but Ah can't read!"

"Well, MacHassan," said Curley Crothers, reading the document a second
time. "Black or white, you fight like a gentleman. I'm proud to have
licked you. Good-by, and good luck! Here's my hand!"

They shook hands, and the seamen started shoreward with the terrier in
tow.

"Did you read the paper?" asked Crothers. "It was dated Aden--non-coms'
mess of some regiment or other. 'This is to certify that this regiment
taught Hassan Ah to use his fists, and that he has since licked every
single mother's son of us!' Pity I didn't see that first, eh?"

"Oh, I dunno," said Joe Byng, who had not had to do the fighting. "You
licked the savage, anyway."

Hassan Ah was right. There was no more shore leave granted. Crothers and
Joe Byng were punished with extra duty and "confined to ship" for coming
back with the marks of fighting on them; and the Puncher gave no further
signs of life until, some three I days later, her long-suffering engines
turned again and she departed through the channel that had brought her
in.

Then the sheik and three others and a certain Hassan Ah went down
at midnight to the jail and lifted with the aid of long poles
passed through the rings in them the largest floor stones of that
vermin-infested building. But the vermin did not trouble them. What they
were after and what they lifted out was the cases of guns and cartridges
the Puncher had contrived to miss.

THE END

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