Much business.
Good-bye!" Somehow you couldn't suspect that kid of telling the truth.
However, there was nothing for it but to go away, with a conviction in the small of your back that he was grinning mischievously after you.
Grim had found him one day starving and lousy in the archway of the Jaffa Gate, warming his fingers at a guttering candle-end preparatory to making a meal off the wax.

He took him home and made Martha, the old Russian maid-of-all-work, clean him with kerosene and soft soap--gave him a big packing-case to sleep in along with Julius Caesar the near-bull-dog mascot--and thereafter broke him in and taught him things seldom included in a school curriculum.
In the result, Suliman adored Grim with all the concentrated zeal of hero-worship of which almost any small boy is capable; but under the shadow of Grim's protection he feared not even "brass- hats" nor regarded civilians, although he was dreadfully afraid of devils.

The devil-fear was a relic of his negroid ancestry.
Some Arab Sheikh probably captured his great-grandmother on a slave-raid.

Superstition lingers in dark veins longer than any other human failing.
I think I called five times before he confessed at last reluctantly that Grim was in.

That was in the morning after breakfast, and I was shown into the room with the fireplace and the deep armchairs.