By Advice of Counsel
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!"
Murphy seized Babu by the arm.
"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!"
"Them ain't Dagos, judge," whispered Roony the clerk. "Them's Turks."
"They ain't neither Turks!" contradicted the stenographer, whose
grammar was almost sublimated by comparison with Roony's. "They're
Armenians--you can tell by their complexions."
"Well, I won't have 'em in here, whatever they are!" announced Burke. "I
don't like 'em. What have you got, Murphy?"
"Shoo! Get out of here!" ordered the officer on duty.
The crowd, however, not understanding, only grinned.
"_Avanti! Alley! Mouch_! Beat it!" continued the officer, waving his
arms and hustling those nearest toward the door.
The throng obediently fell back. They were a gentle, simple-minded lot,
used in the old country to oppression, blackmail and tyranny, and
burning with a religious fervor unknown to the pale heterodoxy of the
Occident.
"This here," began Murphy, "is a complaint by Sardi Babu"--he swung the
cowering little man with a twist before the bench--"against one Kasheed
Hassoun for violating the health ordinances."
"No, no! I do not complain! I am not one who complains. It is nothing
whatever to me if Kasheed Hassoun keeps a camel! I care not," cried Babu
in Arabic.
"What's he talkin' about?" interrupted Burke. "I don't understand that
sort of gibberish."
"He makes the complaint that this here Hassoun"--he indicated the tall
man in the overcoat--"is violating Section 1093d of the regulations by
keeping a camel in his attic."
"Camel!" ejaculated the magistrate. "In his attic!"
Murphy nodded.
"It's there all right, judge!" he remarked. "I've seen it."
"Is that straight?" demanded His Honor. "How'd he get it up there? I
didn't suppose--"
Suddenly Sardi Babu threw himself fawning upon Hassoun.
"Oh, Kasheed Hassoun, I swear to thee that I made no complaint. It is a
falsification of the gendarme! And there was a boy--a red and yellow
boy--who said he had seen thy camel's head above the roofs! I am thy
friend!"
He twisted his writhing snakelike fingers together. Hassoun regarded him
coldly.
"Thou knowest the fate of informers and provocateurs--of spies--thou
infamous Turk!" he answered through his teeth.
"A Turk! A Turk!" shrieked Sardi Babu frantically, beating the breast of
his blue blouse. "Thou callest me a Turk! Me, the godson of Sarkis Babu
and of Elias Stephan--whose fathers and grandfathers were Christians
when thy family were worshipers of Mohammed. Blasphemy! Me, the godson
of a bishop!"
"I also am godson of a bishop!" sneered Kasheed. "A properly anointed
bishop! Without Tartar blood."
Sardi Babu grew purple.
"Ptha! I would spit upon the beard of such a bishop!" he shrieked,
beside himself.
Hassoun slightly raised his eyebrows.
"Spit, then, infamous one--while thou art able!"
"Here, here!" growled Burke in disgust. "Keep 'em still, can't you?
Now, what's all this about a camel?"
* * * * *
"That's the very scuttle, sir," asseverated Scraggs to the firm, as Tutt
& Tutt, including Miss Wiggin, gazed down curiously out of their office
windows at the penthouse upon the Washington Street roof which had been
Willie's target of the day before. "I don't say," he continued by way of
explanation, "that the camel stuck his head out because Willie hit the
roof with the bottle--it was probably just a circumstance--but it looked
that way. 'Bing!' went the ink bottle on the scuttle; and
then--pop!--out came the camel like a jack-in-the-box."
"What became of the camel?" inquired Miss Wiggin, cherishing a faint
hope that--pop!--it might suddenly appear again in the same way.
"The police took it away last night--lowered it out of the window with a
block and tackle," answered the scrivener. "A sort of breeches buoy."
"I've heard of camel's-hair shawls but not of camel's-hair breeches!"
murmured Tutt. "I suppose if a camel wore pants--well, my imagination
refuses to contemplate the spectacle! Where's Willie?"
"He hasn't been in at all this morning!" said Miss Wiggin. "I'll
warrant--"
"What?" demanded Mr. Tutt suspiciously.
"--he's somewhere with that camel," she concluded.
* * * * *
Now, Miss Minerva, as her name connoted, was a wise woman; and she had
reached an unerring conclusion by two different and devious routes, to
wit, intuition and logic, the same being the high road and low road of
reason--high or low in either case as you may prefer. Thus logic:
Camel--small boy. Intuition: Small boy--camel. But there was here an
additional element--a direct personal relationship between this
particular small boy and this particular camel, rising out of the
incident of the ink bottle. She realized that that camel must have
acquired for William a peculiar quality--almost that of a possession--in
view of the fact that he had put his mark upon it. She knew that Willie
could no more stay away from the environs of that camel than said camel
could remain in that attic. Indeed we might go on at some length
expounding further this profound law of human nature that where there
are camels there will be small boys; that, as it were, under such
circumstances Nature abhors an infantile vacuum.
"If I know him, he is!" agreed Mr. Tutt, referring to William's probable
proximity to Eset el Gazzar.
"Speaking of camels," said Tutt as he lit a cigarette, "makes me think
of brass beds."
"Yes," nodded his partner. "Of course it would, naturally. What on earth
do you mean?"
"I mean this," began Tutt, clearing his throat as if he were addressing
twelve good and true men--"a camel is obviously an unusual--not to say
peculiar--animal to be roosting over there in that attic. It is an
exotic--if I may use that term. It is as exotic as a brass bed from
Connecticut would be, or is, in Damascus or Lebanon. Now, therefore, a
camel will as assuredly give cause for trouble in New York as a brass
bed in Bagdad!"
"The right thing often makes trouble if put in the wrong place,"
pondered Mr. Tutt.
"Or the wrong thing in the right place!" assented Tutt. "Now all these
unassimilated foreigners--"
"What have they got to do with brass beds in Lebanon?" challenged Miss
Wiggin.
"Why," continued Tutt, "I am credibly informed that the American brass
bed--particularly the double bed--owing to its importation into Asia
Minor was the direct cause of the Armenian massacres."
"Tosh!" said Miss Wiggin.
"For a fact!" asserted Tutt. "It's this way--an ambassador told me so
himself--the Turks, you know, are nuts on beds--and they think a great
big brass family bed such as--you know--they're in all the
department-store windows. Well, every Turk in every village throughout
Asia Minor saves up his money to buy a brass bed--like a nigger buys a
cathedral clock. Sign of superiority. You get me? And it becomes his
most cherished household possession. If he meets a friend on the street
he says to him naturally and easily, without too much conscious egotism,
just as an American might say, 'By the way, have you seen my new
limousine?'--he says to the other Turk, 'Oh, I say, old chap, do you
happen to have noticed my new brass bed from Connecticut? They just put
it off the steamer last week at Aleppo. Fatima's taking a nap in it now,
but when she wakes up--'"
"What nonsense!" sniffed Miss Wiggin.
"It's not nonsense!" protested the junior partner. "Now listen to what
happens. Some Armenian--the Armenians are the pawnbrokers of Asia
Minor--moves into that village and in three months he has a mortgage on
everything in it, including that brass bed. Then the Turkish Government,
which regards him as an undesirable citizen, tells him to move along;
and Mister Armenian piles all the stuff the inhabitants have mortgaged
to him into an oxcart and starts on his way, escorted by the Sultan's
troops. On top of the load is Yusuf Bulbul Ameer's brass bed. Yusuf
looks out of his doorway and sees the bed moving off and rushes after it
to protect his property.
"'Look here!' he shouts. 'Where are you going with my brass bed?'
"'It isn't yours!' retorts Mister Pawnbroker. 'It's mine. I loaned you
eighty-seven piasters on it!'
"'But I've got an equity in it! You can't take it away!'
"'Of course I can!' replies the Armenian. 'Where I goeth it will go. The
Turkish Government is responsible.'
"'Not much,' says Yusuf, grabbing hold of it, trying to pull it off the
cart.
"'Hands off there!' yells the Armenian.
"Then there is a mix-up and everybody piles in--and there is a
massacre!"
"That's a grand yarn!" remarked Mr. Tutt. "Still, it may be--"
"Bunk!" declared Miss Wiggin. "And what has that got to do with camels?"
"My point is," affirmed Tutt, waving his index finger--"my point is that
just as a Yankee brass bed in Turkey will make certain trouble, so a
Turkish camel in New York is bound to do the same thing."
A door slammed behind them and Willie's voice interrupted the
conversation.
"Mr. Tutt! Mr. Tutt!" he cried hysterically. "There's been a murder
down there--and we--I'm--partly responsible. I spent the night with the
camel and he's--she's--all right--in Regan's Boarding Stable. But
Kasheed is in the Tombs, and I told them you'd defend him. You will,
won't you?"
Mr. Tutt looked at the excited boy.
"Who killed whom?" he asked correctly. "And where does the camel come
in?"
"Somebody killed Sardi Babu," explained Willie. "I don't know exactly
who did it--but they've arrested Kasheed Hassoun, the owner of Eset el
Gazzar."
"Who?" roared Tutt.
"The camel. You see, nobody knew she was in the attic until I saw her
stick her head out of the hole in the roof. Then I told Murphy and he
went up and found her there. But Kasheed thought Sardi had told on him,
you see, and nobody would believe him when he said he hadn't. The judge
fined Kasheed twenty-five dollars, and he--Kasheed--accused Sardi of
being a Turk and they had a big row right there in court. Nothing
happened until the cops had got Eset out of the window and she was over
at Regan's. I stayed there. Her head is bright red from the ink, you
know. Then somebody went over to the restaurant where Sardi was and
killed him. So you see, in a way, I'm to blame, and I didn't think you'd
mind defending Kasheed, because he's a corker and if they electrocute
him Eset will starve to death."
"I see," said. Mr. Tutt thoughtfully. "You think that by rights if
anybody was going to get killed it ought to have been you?"
Willie nodded.
"Yes, sir," he assented.
And that is how a camel was the moving cause of the celebrated firm of