ladder firmly in place, while another, small and lithe as a monkey and
enjoying the task as a monkey might, ran up to the top that leaned
against the window. Evidently he was a skilled worker, for before I
knew what he would be at, he had with some small, sharp instrument,
prized out without breaking it, one of the sections of carved lattice.
This he tossed lightly down to a man who caught it, and as he and four
others after him slipped through the opening, the sergeant knocked on
the closed door, under the swinging form of the crocodile. Nobody
answered. But three minutes passed, and then suddenly there was the
sound of a falling bar, and a very old, very dark man, with a white
turban and a white beard, peeped out.

"Thieves!" he cried in Arabic. "Thieves break in at the windows!"

He was making the best of a bad business, I guessed, and hoped somehow
to justify himself to the police. But though he was gray with fright,
he forgot to look surprised.

My Arabic was not equal to the strain of catching all the gabble that
followed: the old man protesting that it was right to close the house
to-day; that if it were the police and not thieves who broke in, it was
unjust, it was cruel, and his son Mansoor, the caretaker, would appeal
to all the Powers. Before he had come to the end of his first breath,
he was hushed and handcuffed, and hustled away; and another man sprang
forward from behind the angle of a screen-wall inside the entrance. He
was young, and looked strong and fierce as an angry giant, but at sight
of Allen and the rest of us, he stopped as if we had shot him. Perhaps
he had not expected so many. In any case, he saw that there was nothing
he could hope to gain by violence or bluster. All he could do was to
protest as his father had done, that this visit was a violation of his