Nobody can pass the reef at night in shallow-draft lateen-sail boats without having him on board; and though he was never ostensibly paid for his services, it was understood that he performed pilot service in return for certain other opportunities that sometimes came his way. When things happened on the high sea that were not discussed in public, it was understood that Hassan Ah could have discussed them as thoroughly as anybody if he chose. On the whole, then, and within limits that were only more or less definable, he was something of a personality. Men listened to him when he raised his voice in argument, and as one who could grant favors on occasion his words had weight. The sun was very nearly in its zenith, beating down on dry Arabia between racing black clouds, when he had finished talking to the local council in the ramshackle old council-house, skin and mat curtained, that faced the sheik's where the main street broadened for a hundred filthy yards into a market-place. All through his argument he had held a pure-white bull terrier between his knees as proof that he knew whereof he spoke. “Can any of you hold him without being bitten?” he demanded. And they did not seem to care to try. “I know the ways of these men!” he asserted, drawing extravagant expressions of contentment from the dog in proof of it. So the others in the stuffy council place gave the dog a wide berth and no privilege, but conceded him the right to hold the beast, if he wanted to, without personal defilement. And since the way of the world is that a man who has won the first of his contentions can win all the rest with half the ease, he persuaded them with a hurricane of black man's rhetoric to do what Arabs consider almost wicked. Unbelievers who are prisoners should die, beyond all question. “As the dregs of oil shall the fruit of the tree of Al Zakkum boil in the bellies of the damned!” the sheik quoted. “They should be hurried, therefore, to the punishment that waits!” But Hassen Ah outargued him. “Then they will land men from the ship, who will search our houses,” he asserted. “Is there a majority in the council who would like to be searched by unbelievers?” “Then bind them, and take them to their ship, and tell a tale of much drunkenness and wrong-doing. Ask an indemnity, and show the proofs, which will be easy to arrange.” “They, too, will tell their tale!” said Hassan Ah in perfect Arabic. Unlike the more enlightened peoples of the West, Arabs do not encourage the mutilation of their mother-tongue; they teach it as carefully as they talk it, and this negro spoke like an Arab of the blood.