“I think it is fairly certain that they will, believing that we have been thrown off our guard by their friendliness to-day. As soon as Fath-ud-Din is about again, we shall probably have him here, trying his old tricks once more; but I have a pleasant little surprise in store for him. I shall make it clear that all negotiations are to be carried on at this house, and that neither I nor any of you will go to the Palace on any business whatever connected with the treaty. I am not going to risk the loss of any more lives by dividing our force, but I shall not tell him that. It will be a disagreeable shock to him to find that we only become stiffer in our demands as our position grows more precarious, and he will think we possess some sort of moral support behind the scenes of which he is ignorant.” “What a fire-eater the Chief is!” said Stratford later to Dick. “He ought to have commanded one of Nelson’s line-of-battle ships, and engaged a whole French fleet before he went down with guns double-shotted and colours flying.” “A regular old fighting-cock!” said Dick, affectionately. “If we hadn’t had the ladies with us, we should have seen him bearding the King in the Palace itself, and defying Fath-ud-Din and the whole Ethiopian army to their faces, I’m convinced. As it is--well, our prospects don’t look particularly brilliant just now, but I feel that if there is a man on earth who can get us out of this fix, it’s the Chief.” They were superintending the removal of the collection from Dr Headlam’s desolate house to the Mission, and gathering together such poor scraps of personal property as the marauders had overlooked or left behind as worthless, to take home to his mother. When the place was cleared they locked the door and delivered the key to the landlord, who received it with a gloomy face, remarking that he never expected to be able to find another tenant. Dick thought that he was attempting to gain an increase of the substantial rent (as things go in Ethiopia), which had already been paid him, but the landlord had gauged correctly the character of his fellow-citizens. The house stood empty for a long time, gaining a bad reputation without any tangible reason; but at last, for an ample remuneration, a man was found bold enough to sleep there, in order to prove that there was nothing wrong about the place. But that bold man let himself down over the wall into the street in the middle of the night by means of his turban, leaving his mattress behind him; and the next day he told his friends that he had been awakened by hearing the well-known clink of a medicine-bottle against the measuring-glass, and, cautiously uncovering his head, had looked out to see the ghost of the English doctor standing at a phantom table and mixing immaterial drugs. That was enough, and the house was left desolate until it ultimately fell into decay.