e piquant, after all, than I supposed. We
enjoy the magnificent moonlight of the south, we admire a historic river
under its most successful aspect, and we do not exalt ourselves because
our countrymen, many hundreds of miles away, have lost their heads." He
smiled over the piquancy of the situation. "Strength is good," he went
on in his impressive bass, "and courage is better. But reason, as you so
justly say, is best of all. For which reason," he added, "allow me to
recommend to you, my dear Gaston, that you look a little where you are
steering."

Gaston looked. But he discovered that his moment of cheer had been all
too brief. A piquant situation, indeed! The piquancy of that situation
somehow complicated everything more darkly than before. If there were
reasons why he should not go away with the others, as they had all taken
it for granted that he would do, was that a reason why he, Gaston, whose
father had lost a leg at Gravelotte, should do this masquerading German
a service? All the German's amiability and originality did not change
that. Perhaps, indeed, that explained the originality and amiability.
The German, at any rate, did not seem to trouble himself about it. When
Gaston next looked over his shoulder, Magin was lying flat on his back
in the bottom of the boat, with his hands under his head and his eyes
closed. And so he continued to lie, silent and apparently asleep, while
his troubled companion, hand on wheel and _beret_ on ear, steered
through the waning moonlight of the Karun.

VII

The moon was but a ghost of itself, and a faint rose was beginning to
tinge the pallor of the sky behind the Bakhtiari mountains, when the
motor began to miss fire. Gaston, stifling an exclamation, cut it off,
unscrewed the cap of the tank, and measured the gasolene. Then he
stepped softly forward to the place in the bow where he kept his reserve
cans. Magin, roused by the stopping of the boat, sat up, stretching.

"_Tiens!_" he exclaimed. "Here we are!" He looked about at the high clay
banks enclosing the tawny basin of the four rivers. In front of him the
konar trees of Bund-i-Kir showed their dark green. At the right, on top
of the bluff of the eastern shore, a solitary peasant stood white
against the sky. Near him a couple of oxen on an inclined plane worked
the rude mechanism that drew up water to the fields. The creak of the
pulleys and the splash of the dripping goatskins only made more intense
the early mornin