Once in a while some whining cadger of drinks would mutter as Ibrahim Khan reviled him and tossed him a franc. That was a member of the _Sûreté_ giving, and receiving, the lack of news that is falsely said to be good news. Sometimes it was warning, but never encouragement. The quarter of the city that lies between the Nive and the Mousserole Wall is so disreputable that during the war it was out of bounds for soldiers. It is a district of narrow, dingy streets, dirty cafés, bawdy-houses of the lowest order; it abounds in cheap wine, cheaper women, and all the scum and riffraff of a polyglot border-and-seaport town. While the upper stratum of the enemy was doubtless of high degree, the foundation layer would be in the mire. The underworld of France would furnish its quota for the lower order of assassins. The master mind needed dirty tools for dirty work; and here, among the thieves, pimps, cutthroats of beyond the river, the trail might be picked up. Ibrahim Khan sat in one of the dingiest of those unsavory resorts, muttering in Pushtu and Arabic and broken French, alternately gross and poetic as he courted the attention of Marcelle, the barmaid whose coarse, buxom loveliness drew trade for all departments of the house. "Tie your husband to a rope, Bimbar, Tie the rope to a tree; Throw the tree in the river, Bimbar, And come to your lover." Thus he chanted in amorous, wine-muddled accents, the whole stanza in one breath, and, in the Afghan fashion, ending in a high-pitched, gasping cry, a full octave higher. The girl did not understand the words; but there was one sitting in the corner who did. "Oh, my brother," he murmured, and spat contemptuously, "are such as that sister of pigs fit for the pride of the Durani clan?" Ibrahim Khan's hand flashed to the hilt of one of the knives that bristled in his belt. But before he could draw, the thin-faced man smiled. "Put that knife away, brother," he said. "I have news for you." "Well?" interrogated Ibrahim Khan a little less belligerently. "Out with it." "Softly, softly," murmured the stranger. Ibrahim Khan had never seen him along the waterfront, or in the Mousserole quarter. "I am Nureddin. I have been interested in your handiness in certain matters ... and Husayn, the _nakhoda_, speaks well of you----" "He should, Allah blacken him!" admitted Ibrahim Khan, who under his layer of grime was Glenn Farrell, trembling with eagerness to follow up what he sensed was the first open move to take the bait he had so patiently and thus far vainly offered the enemy. "There are women," continued Nureddin, "lovelier than the brides of paradise." Farrell laughed contemptuously, and made an insulting remark that left little doubt as to his opinion of Nureddin's profession: but that was to play his part as a truculent Afghan. "Nay, by Allah!" protested Nureddin with a good-humored laugh. "It is not what you think. Follow me, if you have courage."