it for
yourself, and let me go. Surely I have been punished enough!
Besides, you cannot--you dare not imprison me! I am a French
subject. I have been seized outside the British sphere. I know
you are a poor man--the pay of a British officer is a matter of
common knowledge. Come now, you have done what you came to do.
You have destroyed my influence at El-Kerak. Now benefit
yourself. Avoid an international complication. Show mercy on
me! Take this money. Say that I gave you the slip in the dark!"

Grim smiled. He looked extremely comical without any eyebrows.
The wrinkles went all the way up to the roots of his hair.

"I'm incorruptible," he said. "The boss, I believe, isn't."

"You mean your High Commissioner? I have not enough money
for him."

Grim laughed. "No," he said, "he comes expensive."

"What then?"

"Don't be an ass," said Grim. "You know what."

"Information?"

"Certainly."

"What information?"

"You were sent by the French," said Grim, "to raise the devil
here in Palestine--no matter why. You were trying to bring
off a raid on Judaea. Who are your friends in Jerusalem who
were ready to spring surprises? What surprises? Who's your
Jerusalem agent?"

"If I tell you?"

"I'm not the boss. But I'll see him about it. Come on--who's
your agent?"

"Scharnhoff."

Grim whistled. That he did not believe, I was almost certain,
but he whistled as if totally new trains of thought had suddenly
revealed themselves amid a maze of memories.

"You shall speak to the boss," he said after a while.

I fell asleep then, wedged uncomfortably between two men's legs,
wakened at intervals by the noisy pleading of Mahommed ben Hamza
and his men for what they called their rights in the matter of
Abdul Ali's wallet. They were still arguing the point when we
ran on the beach near Jericho, where a patrol of incredulous
Sikhs pounced on us and wanted to arrest Ahmed and Anazeh's
wounded men. Grim had an awful time convincing them that he was
a British officer. In the end we only settled it by tramping
about four miles to a guard-house, where a captain in uniform
gave us breakfast and telephoned for a commisariat lorry.

It was late in the afternoon when we reached Jerusalem and got
the wounded into hospital. By the time Grim had changed into
uniform and put courtplaster where his eyebrows should have been,
and he, Abdul Ali and I had driven in an official Ford up the
Mount of Olives to OET