Abdul Said Bey Effects a Rescue

"When I dine in a public place"--the Osmanli smiled cunningly from the
depths of small pig-like eyes--"I shield myself behind a screen. Thus
may I observe unobserved."

The sun had set, but the yellow after-glow still lingered in the sky
behind Stamboul as the two men stood looking toward Galata Bridge, where
their quarry had escaped them, and across the Golden Horn.

A pyramid of domes, flanked by a pair of slender minarets, daintily
proclaimed the Mosque Yeni-Djami against the fading amber. On Galata
Bridge itself, the day-long tide of medleyed life was thinning. Where
there had been an eddying current of turbans and tarbooshes,
bespeaking all the tribes and styles which foregather at the meeting
place of two Continents and two seas, there were now only the belated
few.

To the jaded imagination of Martin Effendi and his companion, Abdul
Said Bey, the falling of night over the quadruple city, smothering
more than a million souls under a single blanket of blackness, made no
appeal. They were watching a yacht.

Over the Pera roofs swept flocks of crows to roost in their garden
rookeries at the center of the town. Across the harbor water, now too
gloomy to reveal its thousands of jelly-fish, drifted the complaining
cries of the loons. Then as the occasional city lamps began to twinkle,
making the darkness murkier by their inadequacy, there arose from the
twisting ways of Pera, Galata and Stamboul the night howling of thirty
thousand dogs.