Since leaving school, Helen had firmly established herself as his secretary and had accompanied him wherever he had been sent by the Irrigation Department. She had made herself responsible for his creature comforts, which almost amounted to nil, and the good conduct of the staff which learned to adore her, with the exception of Pierre Lefort.
Half French, half native, he was of the worst type of Oriental. Eaten up with the vanity of the superficially educated, but with a genuine, great knowledge of the Arabian horse and the obstreperous camel, the young man had managed to make himself seemingly indispensable to Sir Richard on his expeditions. Helen became accustomed to great distances and solitude, and her eyes gained the steadfast look of those who look upon the sky as the roof of their dwelling, whilst her unfailing sense of humour invariably brought her safely through the most trying ordeals.
Diplomatically feeling her way through the barbed wire entanglement of her grandfather’s testiness, she gained a great influence over the brilliant man and, knowing how he chafed against the authoritative methods and manner of the government official, had dropped the suggestion in his all-willing ear of taking a busman’s holiday—a holiday expedition with the object of trying to find out the whereabouts of the legendary water in the great Red Desert, the discovery of which had become almost an obsession with him, since the day he had read the vellum inscribed by the Holy Palladius.
They had spent the hot-weather months in getting ready for the expedition, helped enthusiastically by every member of the staff excepting Pierre Lefort who, loving the dregs of the European society he frequented in the cities and the corners of the Bazaar to which he rightly belonged, had made use of every means in his power to frustrate their endeavours.
He had sworn to an epidemic amongst the camels and dromedaries in Arabia proper, which was causing them to die by hundreds; to an absolute dearth of camel drivers, owing to the terror the men had of the animals’ disease; to the truth of the terrible tales that had lately come to hand of the activities of a notorious robber gang, led by a woman, which swooped down from nowhere upon unwary travellers; that, in consequence of this band of brigands, neither guide nor servant could be procured for love or money on the other side, and that last, but not least, no man had ever been known to penetrate, even a little way, into the empty desert and to return alive.
Each of his objections had been met; the expedition, down to the smallest detail, carefully mapped out; the date for the start fixed and the camp pitched some fifty miles out of Ismailiah. Pierre Lefort would doubtlessly, if sullenly, have accompanied the party for the sake of the monetary gain, if he had not fallen a victim to the wiles of a dancer in the Bazaar.
Had ensued a heated scene between him and Sir Richard which had ended by the latter taking him by the collar of the coat and impelling him, none too gently, back upon the road towards Ismailiah.
Since then a week had passed, which Sir Richard had spent in racing, as fast as swiftest camel could take him, into Ismailiah, there to interview men with a knowledge of camels and horses, and racing back to tell his granddaughter of the blanks he had drawn.
There remained another fortnight in which to find someone endowed with camel and horse sense, and Helen had just fled the camp after a trying scene with her distracted and pessimistic relative.
“Grandads,” she had said, after the recital of the latest failure, “I have an idea, although it’s only a faint-hope kind of idea.”