hours, and we whites crowded along together, close after the chief Arab muleteer (all the pack-animals and the other Arabs were miles in the rear), and we laughed, and chatted, and argued hotly about Samson, and whether suicide was a sin or not, since Paul speaks of Samson distinctly as being saved and in heaven.  But by and by the night air, and the duskiness, and the weariness of eight hours in the saddle, began to tell, and conversation flagged and finally died out utterly.  The squeak-squeaking of the saddles grew very distinct; occasionally somebody sighed, or started to hum a tune and gave it up; now and then a horse sneezed.  These things only emphasised the solemnity and the stillness.  Everybody got so listless that for once I and my dreamer found ourselves in the lead.  It was a glad, new sensation, and I longed to keep the place forevermore.  Every little stir in the dingy cavalcade behind made me nervous.  Davis and I were riding side by side, right after the Arab.  About 11 o’clock it had become really chilly, and the dozing boys roused up and began to inquire how far it was to Ramlah yet, and to demand that the Arab hurry along faster.  I gave it up then, and my heart sank within me, because of course they would come up to scold the Arab.  I knew I had to take the rear again.  In my sorrow I unconsciously took to my pipe, my only comfort.  As I touched the match to it the whole company came lumbering up and crowding my horse’s rump and flanks.  A whiff of smoke drifted back over my shoulder, and—­

“The suffering Moses!”

“Whew!”

“By George, who opened that graveyard?”

“Boys, that Arab’s been swallowing something dead!”

Right away there was a gap behind us.  Whiff after whiff sailed airily back, and each one widened the breach.  Within fifteen seconds the barking, and gasping, and sneezing, and coughing of the boys, and their angry abuse of the Arab guide, had dwindled to a murmur, and Davis and I were alone with the leader.  Davis did not know what the matter was, and don’t to this day.  Occasionally he caught a faint film of the smoke and fell to scolding at the Arab and wondering how long he had been decaying in that way.  Our boys kept on dropping back further and further, till at last they were only in hearing, not in sight.  And every time they started gingerly forward to reconnoitre or shoot the Arab, as they proposed to do—­I let them get within good fair range of my relic (she would carry seventy yards with wonderful precision), and then wafted a whiff among them that sent them gasping and strangling to the rear again.  I kept my gun well charged and ready, and twice within the hour I decoyed the boys right up to my horse’s tail, and then with one malarious blast emptied the saddles, almost.  I never heard an Arab abused so in my life.  He really owed his preservation to me, because for one entire hour I stood between him and certain death.  The boys would have killed him if they could have got by me.