Page:Ballantyne--The Pirate City.djvu/279

Rh Ali, who was rather fond of female society, at once advanced with a bow of gracious orientality.

"Com here, Ali; yoo most 'xplain de flowers me bring hom yiserday."

The polite Moor at once followed the pretty Italian, leaving Ted Flaggan with her sister.

"You'll excuse me, ma'am, if I bids you raither an abrup' good marnin'. It's business I have on me hands that won't kape nohow."

Leaving Paulina in some surprise, the blunt seaman put his hands in his pockets, and went off whistling in the direction of Algiers. Turning aside before reaching the town, he ascended the Frais Vallon some distance, meeting with a few Arabs and one or two soldiers, none of whom, however, took much notice of him, as his stalwart figure and eccentric bearing and behaviour had become by that time familiar to most of the inhabitants of the town. It was known, moreover, that he was at the time under the protection of the British consul, and that he possessed another powerful protector in the shape of a short, heavy bludgeon, which he always carried unobtrusively with its head in the ample pouch of his pea-jacket.

As he proceeded up the valley, and, gradually passing from the broad road which had been formed by Christian slaves, to the narrow path at its somewhat rugged head, which had been made by goats,