elieved him?" said his father keenly.

"There was no reason I shouldn't. The nigger never came back, and the
old man stayed with me for two months," Adam returned. "You know what
the best type of a Mohammedan gentleman can be, pater? He was that."

"None finer, none finer," was the answer.

"Except a Sikh," Stalky grunted.

"He'd been to Bombay; he knew French Africa inside out; he could quote
poetry and the Koran all day long. He played chess--you don't know what
that meant to me--like a master. We used to talk about the regeneration
of Turkey and the Sheik-ul-Islam between moves. Oh, everything under the
sun we talked about! He was awfully open-minded. He believed in slavery,
of course, but he quite saw that it would have to die out. That's why
he agreed with me about developing the resources of the district by
cotton-growing, you know."

"You talked of that too?" said Strickland.

"Rather. We discussed it for hours. You don't know what it meant to me.
A wonderful man. Imam Din, was not our Hajji marvellous?"

"Most marvellous! It was all through the Hajji that we found the money
for our cotton-play." Imam Din had moved, I fancy, behind Strickland's
chair.

"Yes. It must have been dead against his convictions too. He brought me
news when I was down with fever at Dupe that one of Ibn Makarrah's men
was parading through my District with a bunch of slaves--in the Fork!"

"What's the matter with the Fork, that you can't abide it?" said Stalky.
Adam's voice had risen at the last word.

"Local etiquette, sir," he replied, too earnest to notice Stalky's
atrocious pun. "If a slaver runs slaves through British territory he
ought to pretend that they're his servants. Hawkin' 'em about in the
Fork--the forked stick that you put round their necks, you know--is
insolence--same as not backing your topsails in the old days. Besides,
it unsettles the District."

"I thought you said slavers didn't come your way," I put in.

"They don't. But my Chief was smoking 'em out of the North all that
season, and they were bolting into French territory any road they could
find. My orders were to take no notice so long as they circulated, but
open slave-dealing in the Fork, was too much. I couldn't go myself, so I
told a couple of our Makalali police and Imam Din to make talk with
the gentleman one time. It was rather risky, and it might have been
expensive, but it turned up trumps. They were back in a few days with
the slaver (he d