“No, I’ve made him lie down in my cabin. He says he can’t sleep, says he can only work. He looks ten years older. Abdallah’s an awful place, and it’s a heavy district. The Mamour there’s a scoundrel. He has influenced the whole district against Norman and our men. Norman--you know what an Alexander-Hannibal baby it is, all the head of him good for the best sort of work anywhere, all the fat heart of him dripping sentiment--gave a youngster a comfit the other day. By some infernal accident the child fell ill two days afterwards--it had been sucking its father’s old shoe--and Norman just saved its life by the skin of his teeth. If the child had died, there’d have been a riot probably. As it is, there’s talk that we’re scattering poisoned sweetmeats to spread the disease. He’s done a plucky thing, though....” He paused. Dicky looked up inquiringly, and Fielding continued. “There’s a fellow called Mustapha Kali, a hanger-on of the Mudir of the province. He spread a report that this business was only a scare got up by us; that we poisoned the people and buried them alive. What does Norman do? He promptly arrests him, takes him to the Mudir, and says that the brute must be punished or he’ll carry the matter to the Khedive.” “Here’s to you, Mr. Norman!” said Dicky, with a little laugh. “What does the Mudir do?” “Doesn’t know what to do. He tells Norman to say to me that if he puts the fellow in prison there’ll be a riot, for they’ll make a martyr of him. If he fines him it won’t improve matters. So he asks me to name a punishment which’ll suit our case. He promises to give it ‘his most distinguished consideration.’” “And what’s your particular poison for him?” asked Dicky, with his eyes on the Cholera Hospital a few hundred yards away. “I don’t know. If he’s punished in the ordinary way it will only make matters worse, as the Mudir says. Something’s needed that will play our game and turn the tables on the reptile too.” “A sort of bite himself with his own fangs, eh?” Dicky seemed only idly watching the moving figures by the hospital. “Yes, but what is it? I can’t inoculate him with bacilli. That’s what’d do the work, I fancy.” “Pocket your fancy, Fielding,” answered Dicky. “Let me have a throw.” “Go on. If you can’t hit it off, it’s no good, for my head doesn’t think these days: it only sees, and hears, and burns.” Dicky eyed Fielding keenly, and then, pouring out some whiskey for himself, put the bottle on the floor beside him, casually as it were. Then he said, with his girlish laugh, not quite so girlish these days: “I’ve got his sentence pat--it’ll meet the case, or you may say, ‘Cassio, never more be officer of mine.’” He drew over a piece of paper lying on the piano--for there was a piano on the Amenhotep, and with what seemed an audacious levity Fielding played in those rare moments when they were not working or sleeping; and Fielding could really play! As Dicky wrote he read aloud in a kind of legal monotone: