hip. I guess you're barking up the wrong tree. Come
to think of it, I was expecting passports. Say, do you come from Enver
Damad?'

'I have that honour,' he said.

'Well, Enver is a very good friend of mine. He's the brightest citizen
I've struck this side of the Atlantic.'

The man was calming down, and in another minute his suspicions would
have gone. But at that moment, by the crookedest kind of luck, Peter
entered with a tray of dishes. He did not notice Rasta, and walked
straight to the table and plumped down his burden on it. The Turk had
stepped aside at his entrance, and I saw by the look in his eyes that
his suspicions had become a certainty. For Peter, stripped to shirt
and breeches, was the identical shabby little companion of the Rustchuk
meeting.

I had never doubted Rasta's pluck. He jumped for the door and had a
pistol out in a trice pointing at my head.

'_Bonne fortune_,' he cried. 'Both the birds at one shot.' His hand
was on the latch, and his mouth was open to cry. I guessed there was
an orderly waiting on the stairs.

He had what you call the strategic advantage, for he was at the door
while I was at the other end of the table and Peter at the side of it
at least two yards from him. The road was clear before him, and
neither of us was armed. I made a despairing step forward, not knowing
what I meant to do, for I saw no light. But Peter was before me.

He had never let go of the tray, and now, as a boy skims a stone on a
pond, he skimmed it with its contents at Rasta's head. The man was
opening the door with one hand while he kept me covered with the other,
and he got the contrivance fairly in the face. A pistol shot cracked
out, and the bullet went through the tray, but the noise was drowned in
the crash of glasses and crockery. The next second Peter had wrenched
the pistol from Rasta's hand and had gripped his throat.

A dandified Young Turk, brought up in Paris and finished in Berlin, may
be as brave as a lion, but he cannot stand in a rough-and-tumble
against a backveld hunter, though more than double his age. There was
no need for me to help him. Peter had his own way, learned in a wild
school, of knocking the sense out of a foe. He gagged him
scientifically, and trussed him up with his own belt and two straps
from a trunk in my bedroom.

'This man is too dangerous to let go,' he said, as if his procedure
were the most ordinary thing in the world. 'He will be qui