much I know, but I'm darned if I can put a name
to it. I pray to God you boys have been cleverer.'

His tone was quite melancholy, and I was mean enough to feel rather
glad. He had been the professional with the best chance. It would be
a good joke if the amateur succeeded where the expert failed.

I looked at Sandy. He filled his pipe again, and pushed back his skin
cap from his brows. What with his long dishevelled hair, his
high-boned face, and stained eyebrows he had the appearance of some mad
mullah.

'I went straight to Smyrna,' he said. 'It wasn't difficult, for you
see I had laid down a good many lines in former travels. I reached the
town as a Greek money-lender from the Fayum, but I had friends there I
could count on, and the same evening I was a Turkish gipsy, a member of
the most famous fraternity in Western Asia. I had long been a member,
and I'm blood-brother of the chief boss, so I stepped into the part
ready made. But I found out that the Company of the Rosy Hours was not
what I had known it in 1910. Then it had been all for the Young Turks
and reform; now it hankered after the old regime and was the last hope
of the Orthodox. It had no use for Enver and his friends, and it did
not regard with pleasure the _beaux yeux_ of the Teuton. It stood for
Islam and the old ways, and might be described as a
Conservative-Nationalist caucus. But it was uncommon powerful in the
provinces, and Enver and Talaat daren't meddle with it. The dangerous
thing about it was that it said nothing and apparently did nothing. It
just bided its time and took notes.

'You can imagine that this was the very kind of crowd for my purpose.
I knew of old its little ways, for with all its orthodoxy it dabbled a
good deal in magic, and owed half its power to its atmosphere of the
uncanny. The Companions could dance the heart out of the ordinary
Turk. You saw a bit of one of our dances this afternoon, Dick--pretty
good, wasn't it? They could go anywhere, and no questions asked. They
knew what the ordinary man was thinking, for they were the best
intelligence department in the Ottoman Empire--far better than Enver's
_Khafiyeh_. And they were popular, too, for they had never bowed the
knee to the _Nemseh_--the Germans who are squeezing out the life-blood
of the Osmanli for their own ends. It would have been as much as the
life of the Committee or its German masters was worth to lay a hand on
us, for we clung together