"Get 'em some!"
That was Jeremy again. Grim didn't answer, but went on talking:
"They're going to get Damascus. All they've waited for was poison gas, and now there's no stopping 'em. They forged this letter after the gas arrived. Now if they catch Feisul in Damascus they'll put him on trial for his life, and they probably hope to get this letter back somehow to use as evidence against him."
"Go slow, Jim!" Mabel objected. "Where's your proof that the French are jockeying this? Isn't that Feisul's seal?"
"Yes, and it's his paper. But not his handwriting."
"He might have dictated it, mightn't he?"
"Never in those words. Feisul don't talk or write that way. The letter's a manifest forgery, as I'll prove by confronting Feisul with it. But there's a little oversight that should convince you it's a forgery. Have you a magnifying glass, doc?"
Ticknor produced one in a minute, and Grim held the letter under the lamp. On the rather wide margin, carefully rubbed out, but not so carefully that the indentation did not show, was the French word magnifique that had been written with a rather heavy hand and one of those hard pencils supplied to colonial governments by exporters from stocks that can't be sold at home.
"That proves nothing," Mabel insisted. "All educated Arabs talk French.
Somebody on Feisul's staff was asked for an opinion on the letter before
it went. My husband's Arab orderly told me only yesterday that a sling
I made for a man in the hospital was magnifique."
The objection was well enough taken, because it was the sort the forger of the letter would be likely to raise if brought to book. But Grim's argument was not exhausted.