"_Mais non_," countered d'Artois, "it is you who will shoot if my plan is right. You are deft at disguise, and you speak several Oriental languages like a native." D'Artois paused, intently studied the lean, bronzed features of his friend, and his cold gray eyes. "An Arab," he muttered. "Possible, but not so good. A Kurd ... yes, that would be better." "Wrong!" contradicted Farrell. "There were some Kurds at the château last night, notably that hell-hound of a Shirkuh. And the first of the assassins I shot down in the plaza was a Kurd. Too many of them in the picture. I might be tripped on their dialect." "An Afghan, then," compromised d'Artois. "They are Aryans, and our blood brothers, those Afghans. You will loiter around the waterfront. I will warn the _Sûreté_ to arrest you at times, but to release you for lack of evidence; so be careful not to be too brazen in building up a local background of feuds and slayings to substantiate your supposed reason for having left your native hills. "It is a slim chance; but it is possible that you will stumble across some Ismailian who will favorably mark your possibilities. In the meanwhile, I will keep in touch with you as much as possible. "But remember, one false move will betray your mission. And the first warning you will receive will be a dagger jammed very deeply into your back. You are flirting with sudden death the moment you leave this house." * * * * * That afternoon Farrell lurched from a doorway that the most vivid imagination could not have associated with the house of Pierre d'Artois. The shape of his eyebrows had been changed by judicious plucking. His hair had been dyed, and the cut of his mustaches altered. Tenacious, finely powdered pigments had been rubbed into his eyelids and about his eyes so as to change their expression: all trifles, yet the total effect, aided by the drunken swagger, the gestures, the reek of _'araki_ and foreign tobacco, was that Glenn Farrell had disappeared, and that a hard, haggard, quarrelsome Afghan sobering up from a spree strode muttering down rue Saint Augustin, and thence toward the _quai_ along the Adour. He found fishing-vessels, tramps from Algiers, and a _zaroug_ that had sailed all the way from the Red Sea with its crew of stout Danakils. Husayn, its _nakhoda_, was a lean, grizzled Arab whose manner suggested pearl-poaching, smuggling, or slave-running from the Somali Coast to Arabia, with piracy thrown in for good measure.... Husayn spoke of his health, which forbade further traffic on the Red Sea.... There was a Levantin, oily and cringing, who peddled narcotics.... There were brawls along the waterfront. No true Afghan would or could abstain. A fight was a fight. Very soon the waterfront boasted a new character, a quarrelsome Afghan, drunken, bawdy, stranded, swearing loudly by the honor of the Durani clan, and ready for any skulduggery. Ibrahim Khan, they called him.