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for us who jobbed them out-walking was our holiday. I had a line from her ladyship in my red hand of toil, and it contained plenty of messages in case I fell in with her son. Sandy Maccullum brought it to the train. His face fell when I said I'd hardly be likely to see his young master.

"For I'm going a clerk for Maplesons in East Africa, and he is an officer soldiering in India."

Sandy was near weeping at this intelligence. He was past sixty, and not overstrong, and had served as confidential servant to the Macenvoys since his schooling

was over.

"But if you do see him, tell him I'm thinking of him always," he said; "and if good or ill befall him here, I'll tell him all. If good come about, these are the hands will take him the emblem of home."

By that I knew they were hoping that young Archie would be chosen the head of his clan, and have the great silver emblem on his table.

I said good-by and hung round my father a bit more than I thought manly at the time. "Sandy's is the face you'll not see again," he said to me; for he had a great fashion of being dismal when occasion of fered.

When I was in the railway carriage, with a snow flurry hiding our little town from me, as if it were veiling what I loved in the moment of our parting, I thought of the Macenvoy emblem, a great hand of silver clasping the dagger, with a little heart skewered on the dagger's point. That was the same device as the crest on her ladyship's note, but the head of the clan had it in heavy silver on his table, calling it "shlanough" in Gaelic; in English, “the emblem of home."

Life in East Africa as I first knew it was not the paradise for nurses and children it has since become. I was a clerk in the transports, going up country to the tune of eight hundred miles and a caravan of five hundred men. But there was money in it then. We had fever enough to shake the bones out of us, and the eternal sameness of the strangeness, if I may put it so, kept us sad. The "bitter beobab" trees stretched from the sea to the Nyanza's shore, and from them the brain-fever bird whistled his one forlorn note. The lack of grass, the soft Swahili lingo, the throbbing clouds of

flies, sickened me with a monotony of unfamiliarity. I longed for the good green and clean streams of home.

The little noises of the night were different; the streams slipped away in the dark with a new song, less lovely than they sing in Scotland; and I'd sit with a sore heart under the moon, a smudge at my side, planning what I'd eat when my time was up, and the keen moorland air had roused my appetite. I fell to describing home dishes to Seyyid bin Omar, who had part charge of the caravan, and from that there grew a serviceable friendship-of service to others than we two.

Seyyid was an old Arab from Muscat. He'd a trick of guessing your thoughts; and, although he was more cruel to porters and animals than I had dreamed a man could be, yet he was loving in his comradeship with me. He knew English and some odd ends of German, and when the rains came I tried to find my way about Arabic—at first, just to please him. We'd "buck" away together, as they call talking in the East, and he'd tell me a word of Mecca or of the Aden merchants, until I began to know his lingo, and my tongue-at first so stiff in performance of new words-took to them kindly; and, though haltingly, I spoke.

We were gone three years on our first "saffari,” and although I meant to get back to Scotland at the end of it, a chance came to me to build a road north from the Tambo district, and, as it meant money, and money means home in large doses, I turned my face to the flies again, to the sand and sun and lonely heat of it, to the full bitterness of the African inland.

Seyyid bin Omar went with me, and I used his queer tongue more and more. "You do not know it all yet," he would say, "but you speak like one kind of Arab. You might have come from the Aden Hinterland-from Arabia Felix."

When the road was finished the commissioner sent a boy traveller from America, with dollars, donkeys, and a marvellous dressing-case, to be the first man to go over it. We met him with gladness, devoured the contents of his "cans," read the letters he brought us, and set faces to the sea, taking his trail.

We could tell his camping places from afar. Although the vultures had gone home,

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a tremulous cloud of flies pulsed, quivering, above their leavings. I found an old newspaper by one camp side, and by the firelight and in fear of lions, I read what had happened in the world.

I held the paperin my hand unfinished, because Seyyid bin Omar was coming toward me with one of his letters, and I could tell by his face that he wanted to talk with me. Any chance might have made me discard that paper. It was the Manchester Guardian, and it was Archie Macenvoy's one chance, as I held it there, but I hadn't thought of him in a year or more.

"I have given heavy thoughts to this," Seyyid said, striking his letter with an open hand. "You could do it-look-I trained you to it, and you never knew." He laughed as a child laughs when he has played a trick upon you.

I read his letter carefully. It was an offer from Maplesons to me, provided Seyyid thought me perfected in Arabic. I was to have "an opportunity" of going to Arabia Felix, Sanaa preferably, to investigate methods of coffee planting and to discover how Europeans might buy the product. I knew no European had gone to Sanaa since the sun shone, and from the wage Maplesons offered me, I knew my life was at risk if I tried to get there.

"No," I said. "I go now, Seyyid, to a white man's country." I took up the newspaper and turned its page, my eye falling on this head-line: "Captain Macenvoy captured in Aden's Hinterland. His fate unknown."

I read the column to its end, and then I spoke to Seyyid. "I was joking," I said in English. "Of course I'll go. Money is money, however I earn it. Better be dead than poor, unasikia?”

The thought of a Scot caged among such as Seyyid made my heart bursting with anger. I had a hope that I might deliver him. The Turk does not always kill at once; God pardon him, he often torments for a twelvemonth.

My own country seemed sweeter than heaven's self just then, and perhaps I was a bit open to heaven's influences as I thought of it, for I was hoping much more to find Archie Macenvoy in Sanaa than to make Maplesons' fortune and my own in the Hinterland coffee.

My paper was seven months' old. I tore

off the part about Archie and hid it from Seyyid in a mouldy pocketbook.

The days of preparation for my trip passed in a flash. I was given a large sum of money, which I turned into carpets to sell en route and at Sanaa. I dyed my hair with the brown juice some Wa-shenzi use for their breach-clouts, and I borrowed a turban from Seyyid, who had already given me a joho, the long coat of the Arab. I knew that I did not look like the real thing, but I believed that I spoke like it.

We went at once to Zanzibar to catch the French mail north. I lived there for three days as an Arab, and bought a good carpet. I tried to buy a good slave, but the missionaries had abolished slavery in favor of idling. I hired a stark "mshenzi" for my "boy," telling him he had been my slave since childhood. After a time he believed me, living in a past I invented for him as he worked up my coffee and food of an evening. I regarded a slave as necessary to me as an Arab. Seyyid, the boy Mohogo, and I left the mail at Djibouti and took places in a dhow bound to Hodeidah. Fifty horses thirsted on its deck, their heel straps burning against their bones and a cloud of flies covering them like a pall. On our arrival they fell on the beach for weariness, and I made the Somalis fearful of losing money in losing them, so that they gave them water and kind words for a while.

Hodeidah is as unpromising as a hard heart. The bitter sun bakes it and at night its streets breathe out the heat they have inspired by day. A man is chained to a post in the town's centre; he shrieks endlessly and is believed to be in some sort holy. No one can remember the offence for which he was bound. It seemed a woful place to me, but I braved the chief Arabs in the town, learning to the full the peccant misrule of Turks, sitting with administrators over clinking coffee cups in the bazaar. They told me much of Archie Macenvoy, and of a dumb man who had come seeking him. Captain Archie had joined a march into the Aden Hinterland with the Aden regiment, he stopping there but a few days on his leave from India. His horse bolted within half a mile of the place where he was to turn back. No Englishman had seen him since. But I heard in the Hodeidah bazaar that he had fought

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The old Arab spoke again, as one retail- tion; turning again, I made for the space ing some jest.

"And one seeks him," he said from his corner-" seeks him without speech. His body is writhed like a tree twisted in a cyclone; his eyes are red like a fighting rooster's, his hair is the color of a henna-stained donkey-as red as glory. He has no real speech; but goes about by day crying his master's name, and searching for him with a charm of silver, a hand, a dagger, and a pierced heart."

"And by night?" I asked, fearful of his quitting the subject.

"By night he writes on walls-yonder is his writing and searches with the charm, as a devil-doctor seeks stolen things."

On the wall of the narrow street in the bazaar I saw a familiar name "Sandy Maccullum."

behind the town. Seyyid had left me at the door of a mosque. I walked through a dirty street wherein the pariah dogs had already begun their nightly roaming. Evil smells of dried shark preparing for supper floated about the quarter. Little lamps of cheap Russian oil burned on narrow window-sills, and sometimes a woman with her slaves, masked and ponderous, passed me with the odd noise of her wide trouser legs rubbing together and the tinkle of innumerable anklets. A bright light glared from one window. I pulled the casement open wider than I found it, and stepping up on a coping looked into an Arab room.

The emblem of home, beautifully polished, twinkled on a heathen blackwood table. I could have fallen on my knees and worshipped it, for the message it brought

me of home fare and Scottish speech. And over against it sat Sandy Maccullum, the silly look on his face that it always wore when he boasted of the greatness of the Macenvoys.

I left the window and went in at the door, hailing him in Gaelic.

My mouth has cracked in desert places for the lack of water, and when I have found it I have drunk my fill with a man's heart and manner, but at the sound of Sandy's Gaelic I became a weak girl, and the pair of us rocked in each other's arms with the wild tears rolling from our eyes.

I found Seyyid and Mohogo and we carried our carpets to the gate. Mohogo made our coffee there while I sat silent, worrying as to what Seyyid would think of Sandy.

But Sandy did not come himself. A slim Mshihiri came, leading one camel, and a child of ten tugged at a Bussorah beast who devoured distance with a stride meaning money. They hailed Seyyid and the brutes knelt for the packing.

I remember little of our journey inland but desert and mountain and frosty mornings. We travelled at night, the camels

"And Archie is the clan's head?" I said, thrusting their supercilious faces before pointing to the silver emblem.

"They chose him, and I bolted away with it, for fear they'd despair of his life, and give it to the cousin."

"I mind my father saying I'd not see your face again, Sandy. You were that poorly. And now you're the first of the home faces for my eyes to rest on." The old man took pride in his weakness; he looked gratified. "I was never much for strength," he said. "Have you a mind to help Archie?"

"A great mind, Sandy, but no plan in it." "If I could speak this devil's lingo, and if I but knew where he was, I'd have him home, dead or alive, for I've a plan would save him."

"I know Arabic; I'm playing to be an Arab, and Captain Archie is in Sanaa, the first white man to set foot in it. What is your plan?" I asked quickly.

"To put him in one of the coffee sacks, sling him over the side of a camel and bring him here at night."

I reflected that they probably took him past English surveillance in Aden in just that way.

"I wish it were quicker work buying camels," I said; "every day I spend here is a threat to his life and mine-and I can't go inland without the brutes."

"Buy camels?" Sandy looked at me with pity. "And waste your life in talk? Lift them, man; sit you here till I lift you a couple."

"And I'll go back for Seyyid and the slave."

"Then meet me where the caravans start at the Gate of the Well."

“Right, man,” I whispered in the street, and wheeled away in the darkness.

them, nosing a way through the darkness under the brilliant stars.

We reached Sanaa one morning early. The sun shone on it lovingly, glancing from many hills into its deep valley, whence minarets thrust up to heaven, as truly sparkling as a lady's fingers knuckle deep in rings. At every gate camels came and went, and the steep, bright roads breathed out coffee. Although the sun was up in a minute, and full day upon us before our eyes were properly open to perceive it, a glow tinted the windows, as if the brief dawn had lingered within the houses. Seyyid explained to me that Sanaa windows were thin sheets of alabaster.

I asked for the house of Khali bin Mohammed, only stopping to wash my feet before I set out for it. A wonderful arabesque framed his doorway and a little court, gay with red crotons, could be seen from his one steep step. I could find no entrance to this place as I walked slowly about, although it was at the side of his house. I took my lodging whence I could watch it—in the house of an Arab who jobbed out camels, quarrelling with their drivers by night and by day.

I studied the court faithfully from my window. It had many possible places for doors, but I could detect none. I knew there was a "go-down" or cellar under it, for my feet rang hollow on the narrow roadway as I passed it. Buying coffee, I lived on little else than hope, watching with the faithfulness of a mother-lion. I believed that Archie Macenvoy's feet had trodden that enclosure, as I believed he slept in that go-down; the last sleep tortured my mind as I pictured him, or else I fancied him chained there, white and discouraged, won

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