you go elsewhere for work it will be at a pay that is only a little more
than half what you are getting now. Your lookout isn't cheery, my
striking friend!"

He made as though to go into his tent. After a brief pause of horror,
Najib pattered hurriedly and beseechingly in his wake.

"Howadji!" pleaded the Syrian shakily. _"Howadji!_ You would not, in the
untamefulness of your mad, desertion us like that? Not _me_, at anyhow?
Not me, who have loved you as Daoud the Emir loved Jonathan of old! You
would not forsook me, to starve myself! _Aie! Ohe!_"

"Shut up that ungodly racket!" snapped Kirby, entering his tent and
lighting his lamp, as the first piercing notes of the traditional
mourner chant exploded through the unhappy Najib's wide-flung jaws.
"Shut up! You'll start every hyena and jackal in the mountains to
howling! It's bad enough as it is without adding a native concert to the
rest of the mess."

"But, howadji!" pleaded Najib.

_"Taman!"_ growled Kirby, summarily speaking the age-hallowed Arabic
word for the ending of all interviews.

"But I shall be beruinated, howadji!" tearfully insisted Najib.

Covertly the American watched his henchman while pretending to make
ready for bed. If he had fully and permanently scared Najib into a
conviction that the strike would spell ruin for the Syrian himself, then
the little man's brain might possibly be jarred into one of its rare
intervals of uncanny craftiness; and Najib might hit upon some way of
persuading the fellaheen that the strike was off.

This was Kirby's sole hope. And he knew it. Unless the fellaheen could
be so convinced, it meant the strike would continue until it should
break the mine as well as the mine's manager. Kirby knew of no way to
persuade the men. The same arguments which had crushed Najib would mean
nothing to them. All their brains could master at one time, without the
aid of some uprooting shock, was that henceforth they were to get double
pay and half labour.

A calm fatalism of hopelessness, bred perhaps of his long residence in
the homeland of fatalism began to creep over Kirby. In one hour his
golden ambitions for the mine and for himself had been smashed. At best
he saw no hope of getting the obsessed mine crew to work soon enough to
save his present contracts. He would be lucky if, on non-receipt of
their demanded increase, they did not follow Najib's muddled preachments
to the point of sabotage.

The more he thought of it, the l