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The looting was a different matter. Had not Mahommed Seti looted all his life–looted from his native village to the borders of Kordofan? Did he not take to foray as a wild ass to bersim? Moreover, as little Dicky Donovan said humorously yet shamelessly when he joined them at Korosko: “What should a native do but loot who came from Manfaloot?”

Dicky had a prejudice against the Murderer, because he was a murderer; and Mahommed Seti viewed with scorn any white man who was not Fielding; much more so one who was only five feet and a trifle over. So for a time there was no sympathy between the two. But each conquered the other in the end. Seti was conquered first.

One day Dicky, with a sudden burst of generosity–for he had a button to his pocket–gave Mahommed Seti a handful of cigarettes. The next day Seti said to Fielding: “Behold, God has given thee strong men for friends. Thou hast Mahommed Seti”–his chest blew out like a bellows–“and thou hast Donovan Pasha.”

Fielding grunted. He was not a fluent man, save in forbidden language, and Seti added:

“Behold thou, saadat el bey, who opens a man’s body and turns over his heart with a sword-point, and sewing him up with silken cords bids him live again, greatness is in thy house! Last night thy friend, Donovan Pasha, gave into my hands a score of those cigarettes which are like the smell of a camel-yard. In the evening, having broken bread and prayed, I sat down at the door of the barber in peace to smoke, as becomes a man who loves God and His benefits. Five times I puffed, and then I stayed my lips, for why should a man die of smoke when he can die by the sword? But there are many men in Korosko whose lives are not as clean linen. These I did not love. I placed in their hands one by one the cigarettes, and with their blessings following me I lost myself in the dusk and waited.”

Mahommed Seti paused. On his face was a smile of sardonic retrospection.

“Go on, you fool!” grunted Fielding.

“Nineteen sick men, unworthy followers of the Prophet, thanked Allah in the mosque to-day that their lives were spared. Donovan Pasha is a great man and a strong, effendi! We be three strong men together.”

Dicky Donovan’s conversion to a lasting belief in Mahommed Seti came a year later.

The thing happened at a little sortie from the Nile. Fielding was chief medical officer, and Dicky, for the moment, was unattached. When the time came for starting, Mahommed Seti brought round Fielding’s horse and also Dicky Donovan’s. Now, Mahommed Seti loved a horse as well as a Bagarra Arab, and he had come to love Fielding’s waler Bashi-Bazouk as a Farshoot dog loves his master. And Bashi-Bazouk was worthy of Seti’s love. The sand of the desert, Seti’s breath and the tail of his yelek made the coat of Bashi-Bazouk like silk. It was the joy of the regiment, and the regiment knew that Seti had added a new chapter to the Koran concerning horses, in keeping with Mahomet’s own famous passage–

“By the CHARGERS that pant,
And the hoofs that strike fire,
And the scourers at dawn,
Who stir up the dust with it,
And cleave through a host with it!”

But Mahomet’s phrases were recited in the mosque, and Seti’s, as he rubbed Bashi-Bazouk with the tail of his yelek.

There was one thing, however, that Seti loved more than horses, or at least as much. Life to him was one long possible Donnybrook Fair. That was why, although he was no longer in the army, when Fielding and Dicky mounted for the sortie he said to Fielding:

“Oh, brother of Joshua and all the fighters of Israel, I have a bobtailed Arab. Permit me to ride with thee.” And Fielding replied: “You will fight the barn-yard fowl for dinner; get back to your stew-pots.”