Always keep a mercy-bullet in your
gun!"
"A mercy-bullet?"
"For yourself!"
The Master pondered a moment or two, as _Nissr_ drifted on toward the
now densely massed Arabs on the beach, then he said:
"You seem to know these folk well."
"Only too well!"
The Master's next words were in the language of the desert:
"_Hadratak tet kal'm Arabi?_" (You speak Arabic?)
"_Na'am et kal'm!_" affirmed the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same
tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do, _Effendi_. Yes,
yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the
headwaters of the Niger.
"Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the
Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely
unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the
campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913."
"Yes, so I have heard. You almost lost your life, that time?"
"Only by the thickness of a _semmah_ seed did I preserve it," answered
the Frenchman. "My mechanician, Lebon, and I--we fell among them on
account of engine trouble, near the oasis of Adrar, not far from here.
We had no machine-gun--nothing but revolvers.
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