I expected him to fire back.  I climbed up beside him to lend a hand with the pistol I had filched from Abdul Ali.  But Grim shouted something about taking away for burial the corpse of a man who had died of small-pox.  The man on the wall commanded us to Allah’s mercy and warned us to beware lest we, too, catch that dreaded plague.

“Inshallah!” Grim answered.  Then he summoned our men from the moat.

They passed up Abdul Ali, dragging him feet-first again with one man keeping a clenched fist ready to strike him in the mouth in case he should forget that corpses don’t cry out.  He looked like a corpse half-cold, as they carried him jerkily along a track that roughly followed the line of the wall.  I don’t suppose that anything ever looked more like an Arab funeral procession than we did.  The absence of noisy mourners, and the unusual hour of night, were plausibly accounted for by the dreaded disease that Grim had invented for the occasion.  My golf-suit was the only false note, but I kept in shadow as much as I could, with the unseemly burden between me and the ramparts.

It was a long time before we had the town wall at our backs.  A funeral, in the circumstances, might justifiably be rapid; but we could hardly run and keep up the pretense.  But at last we passed over the shoulder of a hill into shadow on the farther side, and there was no more need of play-acting.

“Yalla bilagel!” [Run like the devil.] Grim ordered then, and we obeyed him like sprinters attempting to lower a record.

Twelve men running through the night can make a lot of noise, especially when they carry a heavy man between them.  Our men were all from Hebron.  Hebron prides itself on training the artfullest thieves in Asia.  They boast of being able to steal the bed from under a sleeper without waking him.  But even the stealthiest animals go crashing away from danger, and, now that the worst of the danger lay behind, more or less panic seized all of us.

Mahommed ben Hamza refused to follow the regular track, for fear of ambush or a chance encounter in the dark.  Grim let him have his way.  They dragged the wretched Abdul Ali like a sack of corn by a winding detour, and wherever the narrow path turned sharply to avoid great rocks they skidded him at the turn until he yelled for mercy.  Grim pulled off the sack at last, untied his arms and legs, and let him walk; but whenever he lagged they frog-marched him again.

At last we reached a brook where we all waded to get rid of the filth and smell from that infernal moat, and Abdul Ali seized that opportunity to play his last cards.  Considering Ben Hamza’s reputation, the obvious type of his nine ruffians, the darkness and rough handling, it said a lot for Grim’s authority that Abdul Ali still had that wallet-full of money in his possession.  Sitting on a stone in the moonlight, he pulled it out.  His nerve was a politician’s, cynical, simple.  Its simplicity almost took your breath away.