"How about that paperweight?"
"'S too heavy."
"Well--"
"I know!" exclaimed William suddenly. "Gimme that little bottle of red ink. 'S just about right. And when it strikes it'll make a mark so's we can tell where we hit--like a regular target."
Scraggs hesitated.
"Ink costs money," he protested.
"But it's just the thing!" insisted Willie. "Besides, you can charge me for it in the cash account. Give it here!"
Conscience being thus satisfied the two eagerly placed the ink bottle in the proper receptacle, which Willie had fashioned out of a stogy box, twisted back the bow and aimed the apparatus at the slanting scuttle, which projected from a sort of penthouse upon the roof of the tenement house across the street.
"Now!" he exclaimed ecstatically. "Stand from under, Scraggs!"
He pressed a lever. There was a whang, a whistle--and the ink bottle hurtled in a beautiful parabola over Greenwich Street.
"Gee! look at her go!" cried Willie in triumph. "Straight's a string."
At exactly that instant--and just as the bottle was about to descend upon the penthouse--the scuttle opened and there was thrust forth a huge yellow face with enormous sooty lips wreathed in an unmistakable smile. On the long undulating neck the head resembled one of the grotesque manikins carried in circus parades. Eset el Gazzar in a search for air had discovered that the attic scuttle was slightly ajar.
"Gosh! A camel!" gasped Willie.
"Lord of love!" ejaculated Scraggs. "It sure is a camel!"
There was a faint crash and a tinkle of glass as the bottle of red ink struck the penthouse roof just over the beast's head and deluged it with its vermilion contents. Eset reared, shook her neck, gave a defiant grunt and swiftly withdrew her head into the attic.
Sophie Hassoun, the wife of Kasheed, seeing the violent change in Eset's complexion, wrung her hands.
"What hast thou done, O daughter of devils? Thou art bleeding! Thou hast cut thyself! Alack, mayhap thou wilt die, and then we shall be ruined! Improvident! Careless one! Cursed be thy folly! Hast thou no regard? And I dare not send for Doctor Koury, the veterinary, for then thy presence would be discovered and the gendarmes would come and take thee away. Would that we had left thee at Coney Island! O, great-granddaughter of Al Adha--sacred camel of the Prophet--why hast thou done this? Why hast thou brought misery upon us? _Awar! Awar!_"
She cast herself upon the improvised divan in the corner, while Eset, blinking, licked her big yellow hind hump, and tumbled forward upon her knees preparatory to sitting down herself.
"A camel!" repeated Willie, round-eyed. He counted the roofs dividing the penthouse from where Morris Street bisected the block. "Whoop!" he cried and dashed out of the office.
In less than four minutes Patrolman Dennis Patrick Murphy, who was standing on post on Washington Street in front of Nasheen Zereik's Embroidery Bazaar talking to Sardi Babu, saw a red-headed, pug-nosed urchin come flying round the corner.
"One--two--three--four--five. That's the house!" cried Willie Toothaker. "That's it!"
"What yer talkin' 'bout?" drawled Murphy.
"There's a camel in there!" shouted Willie, dancing up and down.
"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!"
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."