Each of his objections had been met; the expedition, down to the smallest detail, carefully mapped out; the date for the start fixed and the camp pitched some fifty miles out of Ismailiah. Pierre Lefort would doubtlessly, if sullenly, have accompanied the party for the sake of the monetary gain, if he had not fallen a victim to the wiles of a dancer in the Bazaar.
Had ensued a heated scene between him and Sir Richard which had ended by the latter taking him by the collar of the coat and impelling him, none too gently, back upon the road towards Ismailiah.
Since then a week had passed, which Sir Richard had spent in racing, as fast as swiftest camel could take him, into Ismailiah, there to interview men with a knowledge of camels and horses, and racing back to tell his granddaughter of the blanks he had drawn.
There remained another fortnight in which to find someone endowed with camel and horse sense, and Helen had just fled the camp after a trying scene with her distracted and pessimistic relative.
“Grandads,” she had said, after the recital of the latest failure, “I have an idea, although it’s only a faint-hope kind of idea.”
“Well!” had snapped Grandads, who was ready to take his ships of the desert into almost any kind of a port to protect himself from the storm of failure which threatened to burst.
“I think you are making a great mountain out of your mole-hill.”
“Lefort. There _are_ others who understand as much about horses as he does. I do—for one—almost—and so does Abdul, who did all the spadework under him. Let me be vet, with Abdul for head groom and——”
“Wh-a-a-t?” Sir Richard had sprung from his canvas chair with a bound which would have done credit to a _jerboa_, or kangaroo rat. “_You!_ In charge of the horses—you—and what do you know of camels, may I ask?”
“As much, dearest, as anybody, which amounts to nothing. If it’s sick, it usually makes up its obstinate mind to die, so there’s no use worrying about _that_; if you want to get an extra hour of work out of it, you give it a most noisome lump of barley-meal and water, and add a cupful of whisky if you want to make it waltz; if you want it to go to the right, touch it on the left, and _vice versa_, and if it’s out on a non-stop run, hang your coat over its head to pull it up. It will go for six days in the summer and, I believe, ten in the winter without a drink, and is warranted to eat everything it comes across; in fact, I saw Mahli making breakfast off your oldest pair of night slippers this very morning.”