"Do I!" Dicky paused and squinted up at the tall Southerner. "What do you suppose I brought you out from your Consulate for to see—the view from Ebn Mahmoud? And you call yourself a cute Yankee?"
"I'm no more a Yankee than you are, as I've told you before," answered the American with a touch of impatience, yet smilingly. "I'm from South Carolina, the first State that seceded."
"Anyhow, I'm going to call you Yankee, to keep you nicely disguised.
This is the land of disguises."
"Then we did not come out to see the view?" the other drawled. There was a quickening of the eye, a drooping of the lid, which betrayed a sudden interest, a sense of adventure.
Dicky laid his head back and laughed noiselessly. "My dear Renshaw, with all Europe worrying Ismail, with France in the butler's pantry and England at the front door, do the bowab and the sarraf go out to take air on the housetops, and watch the sun set on the Pyramids and make a rainbow of the desert? I am the bowab and the sarraf, the man-of-all- work, the Jack-of-all-trades, the 'confidential' to the Oriental spendthrift. Am I a dog to bay the moon—have I the soul of a tourist from Liverpool or Poughkeepsie?"
The lanky Southerner gripped his arm. "There's a hunting song of the
South," he said, "and the last line is, 'The hound that never tires.'
You are that, Donovan Pasha—"
"I am 'little Dicky Donovan,' so they say," interrupted the other.
"You are the weight that steadies things in this shaky Egypt. You are you, and you've brought me out here because there's work of some kind to do, and because—"
"And because you're an American, and we speak the same language."
"And our Consulate is all right, if needed, whatever it is. You've played a square game in Egypt. You're the only man in office who hasn't got rich out of her, and—"