"Camel--yer aunt!" sneered the cop. "They couldn't get no camel in there!"
"There is! I seen it stick its head out of the roof!"
Sardi Babu, the oily-faced little dealer in pillow shams, smiled slyly. He had thick black ringlets, parted exactly down the middle of his scalp, hanging to his shoulders, and a luxuriant black curly beard reaching to his middle; in addition to which he wore a blue blouse and carpet slippers. He was a Maronite from Lebanon, and he and his had a feud with Hassoun, Majdalain, and all others who belonged to the sect headed by the Patriarch of Antioch.
"_Belki!"_ he remarked significantly. "Perhaps his words are true! I have heard it whispered already by Lillie Nadowar, now the wife of Butros the confectioner. Moreover, I myself have seen hay on the stairs."
"Huh?" exclaimed Murphy. "We'll soon find out. Come along you, Babu! Show me where you was seein' the hay."
By this time those who had been lounging upon the adjacent doorstep had come running to see what was the matter, and a crowd had gathered.
"It is false--what he says!" declared Gadas Maloof the shoemaker. "I have sat opposite the house day and night for ten--fifteen years--and no camel has gone in. Camel! How could a camel be got up such narrow stairs?"
"But thou art a friend of Hassoun's!" retorted Fajala Mokarzel the grocer. "And," he added in a lower tone, "of Sophie Tadros, his wife."
There was a subdued snicker from the crowd, and Murphy inferred that they were laughing at him.
"But this man," he shouted wrathfully, pointing at Sardi Babu, "says you all know there's a camel up there. An' this kid's seen it! Come along now, both of you!"
There was an angry murmur from the crowd. Sardi Babu turned white.
"I said nothing!" he declared, trembling. "I made no complaint. The gendarme will corroborate me. What care I where Kasheed Hassoun stables his camel?"
Maloof shouldered his way up to him, and grasping the Maronite by the beard muttered in Arabic: "Thou dog! Go confess thy sins! For by the Holy Cross thou assuredly hast not long to live!"
"Come on!" he ordered threateningly. "Make good now!" And he led him up the steps, the throng pressing close upon his heels.
"What's all this?" inquired Magistrate Burke bewilderedly an hour later as Officer Murphy entered the police court leading a tall Syrian in a heavy overcoat and green Fedora hat, and followed by several hundred black-haired, olive-skinned Levantines. "Don't let all those Dagos in here! Keep 'em out! This ain't a moving-picture palace!"