in another second we had captured two men and a
woman, and it was too late for the spectators to do anything,
unless they cared to risk killing their own leader.

I thrust my way on foot through the milling camels, for I wanted
to be in at the death, as it were, and I saw Grim take the
woman's rifle away. She looked more surprised than any one I have
ever seen--more so than a man I once saw shot in the stomach who
looked suddenly into the next world and did not like it.

"Shout to 'em, Jael!" he ordered in plain English. "Call 'em off,
or I'll kill you! Shout to 'em; d'you hear!"

"Ayisha! What does this mean? Ali? Ali Higg? You here? I
don't understand!"

"You'll be dead before you understand if you don't call those men
off," Grim answered; and his pistol demonstrated that he meant
it, for her men were closing in on us.

So she knelt up on her camel and cried out that Ali Higg was
there, bidding them keep their distance.

"But what does this mean, Ali? And you speak English? Since when?
Oh, I must be mad! You are not Ali Higg! No! I see now you are
not, but . . ."

She turned on Ayisha and spoke in Arabic: "Ayisha, what does this
mean? Answer me!"

But Ayisha said nothing. She chose to get back between the
curtains of the _shibriyah,_ and I saw Narayan Singh on the far
side whispering to her.

"For," as he told me afterward, "the time to persuade a woman you
are her friend is when she is afraid or distracted by doubt. At
all other times she is like a leopard; but then she is like a
lost sheep!"

The silence was at an end now. Every one was shouting; the
real Ali Higg's men wanting to know what had happened, and
Ali Baba's answering them with threats if they dared disobey
and come closer. The effect was exactly as if the figures on a
motion-picture screen could be heard calling back and forth.

The two men whom we had captured with the woman Jael were silent,
staring hard at Grim as if they saw a vision; and Yussuf, the
prisoner we had made at the oasis, tried to talk to them, but
they would not listen to him; the drama was too absorbing. Jael
herself, inclined to be panicky at first, was recovering
self-possession by rapid stages, and grew silent.

She hardly looked like a woman until you came quite close to her,
for she was dressed like a man, in the regular Bedouin cloak and
head-gear, with a bandolier full of cartridges. But her hair
had come unbound, and one long reddish lock of it was over
her s