though it soothed his feelings. There had been flying up the river
strange rumours of trouble down in Cairo, black threats of rebellion--
of a seditious army in the palm of one man's hand. At the cafes on the
Nile, Dicky himself had seen strange gatherings, which dispersed as he
came on them. For, somehow, his smile had the same effect as other men's
frowns.

This evening he added a whistle to his smile as he made his inspection of
the engine-room and the galley and every corner of the Amenhotep,
according to his custom. What he whistled no man knew, not even himself.
It was ready-made. It might have been a medley, but, as things happened,
it was an overture; and by the eyes, the red-litten windows of the mind
of Mahommed Ibrahim, who squatted beside the Yorkshire engineer at the
wheel, playing mankalah, he knew it was an overture.

As he went to his cabin he murmured to himself "There's the devil to pay:
now I wonder who pays?" Because he was planning things of moment, he
took a native drum down to Fielding's cabin, and made Fielding play it,
native fashion, as he thrummed his own banjo and sang the airy ballad,
"The Dragoons of Enniskillen." Yet Dicky was thinking hard all the time.

Now there was in Beni Hassan a ghdzeeyeh, a dancing-woman of the Ghawazee
tribe, of whom, in the phrase of the moralists, the less said the better.
What her name was does not matter. She was well-to-do. She had a
husband who played the kemengeh for her dancing. She had as good a house
as the Omdah, and she had two female slaves.

Dicky Donovan was of that rare type of man who has the keenest desire to
know all things, good or evil, though he was fastidious when it came to
doing them. He had a gift of keeping his own commandments. If he had