The Seventeen Thieves of El-Kalil

“Get the vote an’ everything.”
STEAM never killed Romance. It stalks abroad under the self- same stars that winked at Sinbad and Aladdin, and the only thing that makes men blind to it is the stupid craze for sitting in judgment on other people instead of having a good time with them.
“He who hates a thief is a thief at heart,” runs the eastern proverb that nevertheless includes in its broad wisdom no brief at all for dishonesty.
If you hated thieves in El-Kalil you would be busy and, like the toad under the harrow, inclined to wonder where the gaps are; you can see the graves of the men who have tried it, in any direction, from any hill-top; and Romance, which knows nothing of any moral issue, comes at last with the liquid moonlight making even whited tombs look sociable. But it is better to be sociable while you live, if only for the sake of having some good yarns to tell the other fellows during pauses in between the rounds of feasting in Valhalla, when you get there. El-Kalil is Hebron of Old Testament fame—the oldest known city in the world apart and aloof in the Judean Hills—dirt delightful and without one trace of respect for anything but tradition, courage and cash.
Yet it was contrary to all tradition that an American citizen should be on his way there with almost unlimited authority to up-end everything, and, after spilling all the beans, to sort out the speckled undesirables. We ran into lots of courage, but it was fear of an uprising and its consequences that set the ball rolling. And as for hard cash, it was lack of it that brought the courage out, providing only two young men and some cigarettes wherewith to hold calm and lawful the most turbulently lawless city in the Near East.
Grim took me along for several reasons but the chief one was that he chose so to do.
Having been commissioned in the British army as an American, he had stuck to more than one national peculiarity, of which that first and the sweetest was doing as he gosh darn pleased as long as he could get away with it. Having made good all along that line, he could get away with almost any thing; and by that time, having risked a neck or two together, we were friends.
The second most important reason, I believe, was that he, and the few in authority over him, had discovered that I had no ax to grind. Life isn’t worth while to me if I’ve got to worry over other people’s morals or be a propagandist; to my way of looking at it, a man has a hard enough job to keep his own conscience from getting indigestion, while getting all the fun in sight, and there’s no fun whatever in forcing your opinions on other folk. And the other fellow’s job is difficult enough without our offering ignorant advice. Life’s a great game and the measure of our own cussedness is the measure with which we get cussed. Amen.
So I had fitted unofficially into one or two tight places and officialdom was therefore pleased to let down the bars that restrain the general tourist. But there was a third reason: I was utterly unknown in Hebron, and it is the unknown entity that upsets most calculations, like the joker in a pack of cards.