The Soul of a Regiment

made himself, and men were too busy under him to think of anything except the work in had.

But rumors kept coming in, as they always do in Egypt, filtering in from nowhere over the illimitable desert, bourne by stray camel-drivers, carried by Dervish spies, tossed from tongue to tongue through the fishmarket, and carried up back stairs to Clubs and Department Offices. There were tales of a drummer and three men who played the fife and a wonderful mad feringhee who danced as no man surely ever danced before. The tales varied, but there were always four musicians and a feringhee.

When one Dervish spy was caught and questioned he swore by the beard of the prophet that he had seen the men himself. He was told promptly that he was a liar; how came it that a feringhee -- a pork-fed, infidel Englishman -- should be allowed to live anywhere the Mahdi's long arm reached?

"Whom God hath touched---" the Dervish quoted; and men remembered that madness is the surest passport throughout the whole of N