form of madness. Where a sane man looks for strength and honesty that
he can yoke up with, a Yussuf Dakmar spies out human failings; and
whereas most of us in our day have mistaken pyrites for fine gold, which
did not hurt more than was good for us, he ends by mistaking gold for
dross.

You can persuade such a man without the slightest difficulty that you
are a fool and a crook. Jeremy had turned the trick for his own
amusement as much as anything, although his natural vein of shrewdness
probably suggested the idea. Yussuf Dakmar, ready to believe all evil
and no good of anyone, was convinced that he had to deal with a scatter-
brained Arab who could be used for almost any purpose, and Jeremy's
riotous bent for jumping from one thing to another fixed the delusion
still more firmly.

But Lord, he had caught a Tartar! Outside at the end of the corridor,
in full view, but out of earshot, of Narayan Singh, Yussuf Dakmar made a
proposal to Jeremy that was almost perfect in its naive obliquity.
There was nothing original or even unusual about it, except the
circumstances, time and place. Green-goods men and blue-sky stock
salesmen, race-course touts and sure-thing politicians get away with the
same proposition in the U.S. every day of the week, and pocket millions
by it. Only, just as happens to all such gentry on occasion, Yussuf
Dakmar had the wrong fish in his net.

He jerked his head toward where Narayan Singh sat stolid and sleepy-
looking on a camp-stool with his curly black beard resting on the heel
of one hand.

"Do you know that man?" he asked.