ess possible did it seem to Kirby that
Najib could undo the damage he had so blithely done. Ordering the
blubbering little fellow out of the tent and refusing to speak or listen
further, Kirby went to bed.

Oddly enough, he slept. There was nothing to worry about. When a man's
job or fortune are imperilled sleep vanishes. But after the catastrophe
what sense is there in lying awake? Depression and nervous fatigue threw
Kirby into a troubled slumber. Only once in the night was he roused.

Perhaps two hours before dawn he started up at sound of a humble
scratching at the open door flap of his tent. On the threshold cowered
Najib.

"Furthermore, howadji," came the Syrian's woe-begone voice through the
gloom, "could I borrow me a book if I shall use it with much
carefulness?"

Too drowsy to heed the absurdity of such a plea at such an hour, Kirby
grumbled a surly assent, and dozed again as he heard Najib rumbling, in
the dark, among the shelves of the packing-box bookcase in a far corner
of the tent. Here were stored nearly a hundred old volumes which had
once been a part of the missionary library belonging to Kirby's father
at Nablous. A few years earlier, at the moving of the mission, the dead
missionary's scanty library had been shipped across country to his son.

Kirby awoke at greyest daylight. Through force of habit he woke at this
hour; in spite of the workless day which he knew confronted him. It was
his custom to get up and take his bath in the rain cistern at this time,
and to finish dressing just as the men piled out for the morning's work.

Yet now the first sounds that smote his ears as he opened his eyes were
the rhythmic creak of the mine windlass and equally rhythmic, if less
tuneful, chant of the men who were working it;

_"All-ah sa-eed!--Ne-bi sa-eed! Ohe! Sa-eed! Sa-eed! Sa-EED!"_

In the distance, dying away, he heard the plodding hoofs of a string of
pack mules. From the direction of the mine came the hoodlum racket which
betokens, in Syria, the efforts of a number of honest labourers to
perform their daily tasks in an efficient and orderly way.

Kirby, in sleepy amaze, looked at his watch in the dim dawn light. He
saw it was still a full half hour before the men were due to begin work.
And by the sounds he judged that the day's labour was evidently well
under way. Yes, and to-day there was to have been no work done!

Kirby jumped out of bed and strode dazedly to his tent door. At the mine
b