Terence O'Rourke, Gentleman Adventurer
really a very impressive and distinguished-looking old Moor—and offers me one hundred pounds if I'll remove the protection. I explained that I wasn't doing business on that basis; and he gradually bid me up to five hundred pounds—finally flung out in a towering rage because I wouldn't do t'other chap dirt. Said that my predecessor would have jumped at one hundred pounds. As near as I can figure it out, the caid and the bashaw between them have a grouch against my leather merchant, and want to chuck him into prison, bastinado him, and confiscate his property. They don't dare touch him while he has my protection, and it's worth twenty-five hundred dollars to them to have it removed. I told the caid that sort of thing was what lost the other consul his job, but he didn't or couldn't understand, and was pleased to take it as a personal affront."
Again Senet laughed—compassionately and wonderingly. "Now, what are you going to do with people that behave that way?" he asked.
O'Rourke chuckled grimly. "Ye've a lot to learn, me boy," he told him; and sat quiet for a space, looking rather wistfully out to sea.
From the terrace of the Hôtel d'Angleterre, pretty much all Tangiers slopes down steeply to the harbor. In the moonlight the low, white houses shone brightly in a way resembling a glacier seamed with narrow purple rifts, and crevasses, and ravines—which are the streets of Tangiers.
Down on the harbor front the electric arcs were blazing fitfully; by the wharves and at anchor in the roadstead, slant lateen sails of feluccas gleamed weirdly in the moon's soft radiance, and a mail steamer just in from Gibraltar looked like some monstrous crawling white bug studded with many-colored eyes.
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