"Or we will go after you!" came the voice of "Captain Alden," with

a little catch of anxiety not at all masculine. Something in the
femininity of her promise stirred the Master's heart a second, but he
dismissed it.

"Either we shall return by nine, or never," he said calmly.

"Let me go, then!" whispered Alden. "Go, in place of you! You are more
needed than I. Without you all these men are lost. Without me--they
would not miss me, sir!"

"I cannot argue that point with you, Captain. We start at once." He
turned to Rrisa, and in Arabic said:

"The road we are about to take may lead thee to Paradise. A
sand-adder, a scorpion, or a bullet may be the means. Dost thou stand
firm with me?"

The Arab stretched out a thin, brown hand to him in the dark.

"Firm as my faith, Master!" he replied. "Both to help you, and to
destroy the _beni kalb_ (dog-sons), I would pass through Al Araf, into
Eblis! What will be, must be. No man dieth except by permission of
Allah, according to what is written on the scrolls of the angel, Al
Sijil.

"I go with you, Master, where you go, were it to Jehannum! I swear
that by the rising of the stars, which is a mighty oath. _Tawakkal al
Allah!_" (Place reliance on Allah!)

"By the rising of the stars!" repeated Leclair, also in Arabic. "I too
am with you to the end, _M'alme!_"

The Master assured himself that his night-glasses with the megaphotic
reflectors were in their case slung over his shoulder. He looked once
more to his weapons, both ordinary and lethal, and likewise murmured:

"By the rising of the stars!"

Then said he crisply, while the fire-glow of Leclair's strongly
inhaled cigarette threw a dim light on the tense lines of his wounded
face:

"Come! Let us go!"

Leclair buried his cigarette in the warm earth.

Rrisa caught up a handful of sand and flung it toward the unseen
enemy, in memory of the decisive pebbles thrown by Mohammed at the
Battle of Bedr, so great a victory for him.

Then he followed the Master and Leclair, with a whispered:

"_Bismillah wa Allahu akbar_![1]"

[Footnote 1: In the name of Allah, and Allah is greatest!]

Together, crawling on their bellies like dusty puff-adders of the
Sahara itself, the three companions in arms--American, French,
Arab--slid out of the shallow trench, and in the gloom were lost to
sight of the beleaguered Flying Legion.

Their mission of death, death to the Beni Harb or to themselves, had
begun.




CHAPTER XXIV


ANGELS OF DEATH

In utter silence, moving only a foot at a time, the trio of
man-hunters advanced. They spaced themselves out, dragged themselves
forward one at a time, took advantage of every slightest depression,
every wrinkle in the sandy desert-floor, every mummy-like acacia and
withered tamarisk-bush, some sparse growth of which began to mingle
with the halfa-grass as they passed from the coast-dunes to the desert
itself.

Breathing only through open mouths, for greater stillness, taking care
to crackle no twig nor even slide loose sand, they labored on, under
the pale-hazed starlight. Their goal was vague. Just where they
should come upon the Beni Harb, in that confused jumble of dunes and
_nullahs_ (ravines) they could not tell; nor yet did they know the
exact distance separating the Legion's trenches from the enemy. All
was vague mystery--a mystery ready at any second, at any slightest
alarm, to blaze out death upon them.

None the less, stout-hearted and firm of purpose, they serpented their
painful way prone on the hot, dusty bosom of the Sahara. Fate for them
and for all the Legion, lay on so slight a thing as the stirring of
a twig, the _tunk_ of a boot against a bleached camel's skull, the
possibility of a sneeze or cough.

Even the chance scaring-up of a hyena or a vagrant jackal might betray
them. Every breath, every heartbeat was pregnant with contingencies of
life and death.

Groveling, they slipped forward, dim, moving shadows in a world of
brown obscurity. At any moment, one might lay a hand on a sleeping
puff-adder or a scorpion. But even that had been fore-reckoned. All
three of them had thought of such contingencies and weighed them.
Not one but had determined to suppress any possible outcry, if thus
stricken, and to die in absolute silence.

What mattered death for one, if two should win to the close range
necessary for discharging the lethal capsules? What mattered it even
for two, if one should succeed? The survivors, or the sole survivor,
would simply take the weapons from the stricken and proceed.

After what seemed more than an hour, though in fact it was but the ten
minutes agreed on with Bohannan, off behind them toward the coast a
sudden staccato popping of revolvers began to puncture the night. Up
and down the Legionaries' trench it pattered, desultory, aimless.

The three men engaged in the perilous task of what the Arabs call
_asar_, or enemy-tracking, lay prone, with bullets keening high
overhead. As the Master looked back, he could see the little spurts of
fire from that fusillade.

The firing came from more to the left than the Master had reckoned,
showing him that he had got a little off his bearings. But now he took
his course again, as he had intended to do from the Legion's fire; and
presently rifle work from the Arabs, too, verified, his direction.

The Master smiled. Leclair fingered the butt of his revolver.

Rrisa whispered curses:

"Ah, dog-sons, may you suffer the extreme cold of El Zamharir! Ah, may
_Rih al Asfar_, the yellow wind (cholera), carry you all away!"

The racket of aimless firing continued a few minutes, underneath the
mild effulgence of the stars. It ceased, from the Legion's trenches at
the agreed moment; and soon it died down, also from the Arabs'. Quiet
rose again from the desert, broken only by the surf-wash on the
sand, the far, tremulous wail of a jackal, the little dry skitter of
scorpions.

The three scouts lay quiet for ten minutes after the volleying had
ceased. Silence settled over the plain; but, presently, a low moaning
sound came indistinctly from the east. It lasted only a moment, then
died away; and almost at once, the slight wind that had been blowing
from the sea hushed itself to a strange calm.

Rrisa gave anxious ear. His face grew tense, but he held his peace.
Neither of the white men paid any heed to the slight phenomenon. To
them it meant nothing. For all their experience with the desert, they
had never happened to hear just that thing. The Arab, however, felt a
stab of profound anxiety. His lips moved in a silent prayer to Allah.

Once more the Master raised his hand in signal of advance. The three
man-stalkers wormed forward again. They now had their direction,
also their distance, with extreme precision; a simple process of
triangulation, in which the glow of the beach-fire had its share, gave
them the necessary data.

Undaunted, they approached the camp of the Beni Harb; though every
moment they expected to be challenged, to hear the crack of an
alarm-rifle or a cry to Allah, followed by a deadly blast of slugs.

But fortune's scale-pan dipped in their direction, and all held still.
The sun-baked desert kept their secret. Onward they crawled, now over
sand, now over cracked mud-flakes of saline deposit where water had
dried at the bottom of a _ghadir_. All was calm as if the spirit of
rest were hovering over the hot, fevered earth, still quivering from
the kiss of its great enemy, the sun.

"Peace, it is peace until the rising of the morn!" a thought came to
the Master's mind, a line from the chapter Al Kadr, in the Koran. He
smiled to himself. "False peace," he reflected. "The calm before the
storm!" Prophetic thought, though not as he intended it!

On and on the trio labored, soundlessly. At last the chief stopped,
held up his hand a second, lay still. The others glimpsed him by the
starlight, nested down in a shallow depression of the sand. They crept
close to him.

"Lieutenant," he whispered, "you bombard the left-hand sector, toward
the fire and the sea. Rrisa, take the right-hand one. The middle is
for me. Fire at will!"

Out from belts and pockets came the lethal pistols. With
well-estimated elevation, the attackers sighted, each covering his
own sector. Hissing with hardly audible sighs, the weapons fired their
stange pellets, and once again as over the woods on the Englewood
Palisades--really less than twenty-four hours ago, though it seemed
a month--the little greenish vapor-wisps floated down, down, sinking
gently on the Sahara air.

This attack, they knew, must be decisive or all would be hopeless. The
last supply of capsules was now being exhausted. Everything had been
staked on one supreme effort. Quickly the attackers discharged their
weapons; then, having done all that could be done, lay prone and
waited.

Once again that hollow moaning sound drifted in across the baked
expanse of the Sahara--a strange, empty sound, unreal and ominous.
Then came a stir of sultry breeze, from the east. It strengthened;
and a fine, crepitant sliding of sand-particles became audible. Rrisa
stirred uneasily.

"Master," he whispered, "we should not delay. If the _jinnee_ of the
waste overtake us, we may be lost."

"The _jinnee_ of the waste?" the Master answered, in a low tone. "What
nonsense is this?"

"The simoom, Master--the storm of sand. We call it the work of evil
spirits!"

The Master made no reply, save to command silence.

For a time nothing happened in the Arabs' camp. Then came a little
stir, off there in the gloom. A sound of voices grew audible. The name
of Allah drifted out of the all-enveloping night, to them, and that of
his Prophet. A cry: "_Ya Abd el Kadir_--" calling on a patron saint,
died before the last word, "_Jilani_," could find utterance. Then
silence, complete and leaden, fell with uncanny suddenness.

The Master laughed, dryly. He touched Leclair's arm.

"Strong medicine for the Beni Harb, Lieutenant," said he. "Their own
_imams_ (priests) have strong medicine, too, but not so strong as that
of the cursed sons of Feringistan. Sleep already lies heavy on the
eyelids of these sons of Allah. And a deeper sleep shall soon overcome
them. Tell me, Lieutenant, can you kill men wholesale?"

"Yes, my Captain."

"Sleeping men, who cannot resist you? Can you kill them
scientifically, in masses, without anger?"

"How do you know now, my Captain, that it will not be in anger?"
And the Frenchman half eased himself up on hands and knees, peering
forward into the night. "After what these Beni Harb--or their close
kin--have done to me and to poor Lebon--listen! What was that?"

"What do you mean?"

"That far, roaring noise?"

"It is nothing! A little wind, maybe; but it is nothing, nothing!
Come, I am ready for the work!"

The Master stood up. Rrisa followed suit. No longer crawling, but
walking erect, they advanced. They still used caution, careful to make
no noise; but confidence had entered into them. Were not the Arabs all
asleep?

The white men's faces were pale and drawn, with grim determination for
the task that lay ahead--the task of converting the Beni Harb's camp
into a shambles. The Arab's face, with white-rimmed eyes and with
lips drawn back from teeth, had become that of a wild animal. Rrisa's
nostrils were dilated, to scent out the enemy. He was breathing hard,
as if he had run a mile.

"They are near, now, _Ya M'alme!_" said he. "They are close at hand,
these _nakhawilah_! (pariahs). Allah, the high, the great, hath
delivered them into our hands. Verily there is no power or might but
Allah. Shall I scout ahead, Master, and spy out the camp?"

"No, Rrisa. I send no man where I will not gladly go myself. All three
of us, forward!"

Again they advanced, watchful, revolvers in hands, ready for any
sudden ambush. All at once, as they came up over a breastwork of hard
clay and gravel that heaved itself into rolling sands, the camp of the
Beni Harb became visible. Dim, brown and white figures were lying all
about, distorted in strange attitudes, on the sand beyond the ridge.
There lay the despoilers of the Haram, the robber-tribe of Sheik Abd
el Rahman, helpless in blank unconsciousness.

The Master laughed bitterly, as he strode forward into the camp, the
long lines of which stretched vaguely away toward the coast where the
fire was still leaping up against the stars, now paled with a strange
haze.

Starlight showed weapons lying all about--long rifles and primitive
flint-locks; _kanat_ spears of Indian male-bamboo tipped with steel
and decorated with tufts of black ostrich-feathers; and _jambiyehs_,
or crooked daggers, with wicked points and edges.

"Save your fire, men," said the Master picking up a spear. "There
are plenty of means, here, to give these dogs the last sleep, without
wasting good ammunition. Choose the weapon you can handle best, and
fall to work!"

With a curse on the heretic Beni Harb, and a murmur of thanks to Allah
for this wondrous hour, Rrisa caught up a short javelin, of the kind
called _mirzak_. The lieutenant chose a wide-bladed sword.

"Remember only one thing, my brothers in arms!" exclaimed the Master.
"But that is most vital!" He spoke in Arabic.

"And what may it be?" asked the Frenchman, in the same tongue.

"I do not know whether old Sheik Abd el Rahman is with this party or
not, but if either of you find him, kill him not! Deliver him to me!"

"Listen, Master!" exclaimed Rrisa, and thrust the point of his javelin
deep into the sand.

"Well, what now, Rrisa?"

"Shall we, after all, kill these sleeping swine-brothers?"

"Eh, what? Thy heart then, hath turned to water? Thou canst not kill?
They attacked us--this is justice!"

"And if they live, they will surely wipe us out!" put in the
Frenchman, staring in the gloom. "What meaneth this old woman's
babble, son of the Prophet?"

"It is not that my heart hath turned to water, nor have the fountains
of mine eyes been opened to pity," answered Rrisa. "But some things
are worse than death, to all of Arab blood. To be despoiled of arms
or of horses, without a fight, makes an Arab as the worm of the earth.
Then he becometh an outcast, indeed! 'If you would rule, disarm'," he
quoted the old proverb, and added another: "'Man unarmed in the desert
is like a bird shorn of wings.'"

"What is thy plain meaning in all this?" demanded the chief.

"Listen, _M'alme_. If you would be the Sheik of Sheiks, carry away
all these weapons, and let these swine awaken without them. They would
drag their way back to the oases and the black tents, with a story
the like of which hath never been told in the Empty Abodes. The Sahara
would do homage, Master, even as if the Prophet had returned!"

"_Lah_! I am not thinking of the Sahara. The goal lies far beyond--far
to eastward."

"Still, the folk are Arabs there, too. They would hear of this, and
bow to you, my _M'alme_!"

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I can take no chances, Rrisa. The land, here
and to the eastward, might all arise against us. The tribes might come
against us like the _rakham_, the carrion-vultures. No, we must kill
and kill, so that no man remaineth here--none save old Abd el Rahman,
if Allah deliver him into our hands!"

"That is your firm command, Master?"

"My firm command!"

"To hear the Master is to obey. But first, grant me time for my
_isha_, my evening prayer!"

"It is granted. And, Rrisa, _there_ is the _kiblah_, the direction of
Mecca!"

The Master pointed exactly east. Rrisa faced that way, knelt,
prostrated himself. He made ablution with sand, as Mohammed allows
when water cannot be found. Even as he poured it down his face, the
strangely gusting wind flicked it away in little whirls.




CHAPTER XXV


THE GREAT PEARL STAB

The Master began to feel a peculiar anxiety. Into the east he peered,
where now indeed a low, steady hum was growing audible, as of a
million angry spirits swarming nearer. The stars along that horizon
had been blotted out, and something like a dark blanket seemed to be
drawing itself across the sky.

"My Captain," said the lieutenant, "there may be trouble brewing,
close at hand. A sand-storm, unprotected as we are--"

"Men with stern work to do cannot have time to fear the future!"

Leclair grew silent. Rrisa alone was speaking, now. With a call of
"_Ya Latif!_" (O Merciful One!) he had begun the performance of his
ceremony, with rigid exactness. He ended with another prostration and
the usual drawing down of the hands over the face. Then he arose, took
up his javelin again, and with a clear conscience--since now his rites
had all been fulfilled--cried aloud:

"Now, Master, I am ready for the work of helping Azrael, the
death-angel, separate the souls and bodies of these Shiah heretics!"

A sudden howling of a jackal startled Rrisa. He quivered and
stood peering into the night, where now the unmistakable hum of
an approaching sand-storm was drawing near. His superstitious soul
trembled with the old belief of his people that creatures of the
dog breed can see Azrael, invisible to human eyes. At thought of
the death-angel standing nigh, his heart quaked; but rage and hate
inspired him, and he muttered:

"Fire to your bellies, broiling in white flame! Fuel of Jehannum, may
Eblis be your bed, an unhappy couch! Spawn of Shaytan (Satan), boiling
water to cool your throats! At Al Hakkat (judgment day) may the
_jinnee_ fly away with you!"

"To work, men!" cried the Master. "There is great work to do!"

As if in answer to his command, a blustering, hot buffet of wind
roared down with amazing suddenness, filling the dark air with a
stinging drive of sand. The fire by the beach flailed into long
tongues of flame, throwing black shadows along the side of the wady.
No stars were now visible. From empty spaces, a soughing tumult leaped
forth; and on the instant a furious gust of fine, cutting particles
whirled all about, thicker than driven snow in a northern blizzard.

"Iron, O thou ill-omened one!" cried Rrisa, with the ancient
invocation against the sand-storm. He stretched out his forefinger,
making the sign of protection. Neither the meaning of his cry nor
of the gesture could he have explained; but both came to him
involuntarily, from the remote lore of his people.

He turned from the oncoming storm, leaning against the wind, clutching
for his cap that the wind-devil had just whirled away. After it he
stumbled; and, falling to his knees, groped for it in the gloom.

"Thousand devils!" ejaculated the Frenchman. "No time, now, for
killing! Lucky if we get back ourselves, alive, to the beach! My
Captain!"

"What now?" the Master flung at him, shielding mouth and eyes with
cupped hands.

"To the wady, all of us! That may give protection till this blast of
Hell passes!"

A startled cry from Rrisa forestalled any answer. The Arab's voice
rose in a wild hail from the sand-filled dark:

"O _M'alme_, _M'alme!_"

"What, Rrisa?"

"Behold! I--_I have found him!_"

"Found--?" shouted the Master, plunging forward.

Leclair followed close, staggering in the sudden gale. "_Abd el
Rahman?_"

"The old hyena, surely! _M'alme, M'alme! See!_"

The white men stumbled with broken ejaculations to where Rrisa was
crouched over a gaunt figure in the drifting sand.

"Is that he, Rrisa?" cried the Master. "Art thou sure?"

"As that my mother bore me! See the old jackal, the son of Hareth!
(the devil). Ah, see, see!"

"_Dieu_!" exclaimed the Frenchman, in his own tongue. "It is none
other!" With a hand of great rejoicing, he stirred the unconscious
Sheik--over whom the sand was already sifting as the now ravening
simoom lashed it along.

Forgotten now were all his fears of death in the sand-storm. This
delivery of the hated one into his hands had filled him with a savage
joy, as it had the two others.

"Ah, _mon vieux!_" he cried. "It is only the mountains that never
meet, in time!"

The Master laughed, one of those rare flashes of merriment that
at infrequent intervals pierced his austerity. Away on the growing
sand-storm the wind whipped that laugh. Simoom and sand now appeared
forgotten by the trio. Keen excitement had gripped them; it held them
as they crouched above the Sheik.

"Allah is being good to us!" exulted the Master, peering by the
gale-driven fire-glare. "This capture is worth more to the Legion than
a hundred machine-guns. What will not the orthodox tribes give for
this arch-Shiah, this despoiler of the sacred Haram at Mecca?"

He began feeling in the bosom of the old man, opening the cloaklike
burnous and exploring the neck and chest with eager fingers.

"If we could only lay hands on the fabled loot of the Haram!" he
whispered, his voice tense with excitement.

Rrisa, wide-eyed, with curling lips of scorn, peered down at the
Sheik. The orderly, bare-headed, was shielding eyes and face from the
sand-blast, with hands that trembled. His teeth were bared with hate
as he peered at the prostrate heretic.

A tall, powerful figure of a man the Sheik was, lying there on his
right side with his robe crumpled under him--the robe now flapping,
whipping its loose ends in the high and rising wind. His _tarboosh_
had been blown away, disclosing white hair.

That hair, too, writhed and flailed in the gusts that drove it full
of sand, that drifted his whole body with the fine and stinging
particles. His beard, full and white, did not entirely conceal the
three parallel scars on each cheek, the _mashali_, which marked him as
originally a dweller at Mecca.

One sinewy brown arm was outflung, now almost wholly buried in the
growing sand-drift. The hand still gripped a long, gleaming rifle,
its stock and barrel elaborately arabesqued in silver picked out with
gold.

"Ah!" exclaimed the Master again, pulling at a thin crimson cord his
questing fingers had discovered about the old man's neck. With hands
that trembled a little, he drew out this cord. Then he uttered an
exclamation of intense disappointment.

There was nothing at the end of the crimson loop, save a _lamail_, or
pocket Koran. Leclair muttered a curse, and moved away, peering
toward the fire, spying out the wady through the now almost choking
sand-drive--the wady where they certainly must soon take refuge or be
overwhelmed by the buffeting lash of sand whirled on the breath of the
shouting tempest.

Even in the Master's anger, he did not throw the Koran away. Too
astute, he, for any such act in presence of Rrisa. Instead, he bound
the Arab to fresh devotion by touching lips and forehead, and by
handing him the little volume. The Master's arm had to push its way
against the wind as against a solid thing; and the billion rushing
spicules of sand that swooped in upon him from the desert emptiness,
stung his flesh like tiny scourges.

"This Koran, Rrisa, is now thine!" he cried in a loud voice, to make
the Arab hear him. "And a great gift to thee, a Sunnite, is the Koran,
of this desecrating son of the rejected!"

Bowed before the flail of the sand--while Rrisa uttered broken words
of thanks--the Master called to Leclair:

"By _Corsi_ (Allah's throne), now things assume a different aspect!
This old dog of dogs is a prize, indeed! And--what now--"

Leclair did not answer. The Frenchman was not even near him. The
Master saw him in the wady, dimly visible through the ghostly white
sand-shrouds spinning in the blue-whipped fire-glare. There on hands
and knees the lieutenant was huddled. With eager hands he was tearing
the hood of a _za'abut_--a rough, woolen slave cloak, patched and
ragged--from the face of a prostrate figure more than half snowed
under a sand-drift.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" the Master heard him cry. "_Mais, nom de_--"

"What have you found, Lieutenant?" shouted the Master, letting the
simoom drive him toward the wady. In their excitement none of the men
would yet take cover, lie down and hide their faces under their coats
as every dictate of prudence would have bidden. "Who is it, now?
What--"

"Ah, my Captain! Ah! the pity of it! Behold!"

The Frenchman's voice, wind-gusted, trembled with grief and passionate
anger; yet through that rage and sorrow rang a note of joy.

"Tell me, Leclair! Who, now?" demanded the Master, as he came close
and peered down by the fire-gleam roaring on the beach, sending
sheaves of sparks in comet-tails of vanishing radiance down-wind with
rushing sand.

"It is impossible, my Captain," the lieutenant answered in French. His
voice could now make itself heard more clearly; for here in the wady
a certain shelter existed from the roaring sand-cyclone. "Impossible,
but--_Dieu_!--it is true!"

"What is true?"

"Incredible, yet--_voila_!"

"In Allah's name, Lieutenant!" the Master ejaculated, "compose
yourself! Explain! Who is this Arab, here?"

"No Arab, sir! No, no!"

"Not an Arab? Well, what is he, then?"

"Ah, these scars, my Captain! Behold--see the slave dress, the weals
of the branding-iron on cheek and brow! Ah, for pity! See the starved
body, the stripes of the lash, the feet mangled by the bastinado! What
horrible things they have done to him--ah, God have pity on us!"

Tears gleamed on the stern fighter's cheeks, there in the ghostly blue
firelight--tears that washed little courses through the dust and sand
now griming his face. The French airman, hard in battle and with heart
of steel and flame, was crying like a child.

"What now? Who is it?" shouted the Master. "A European?"

"Yes, my Captain! A Frenchman!"

"A Frenchman. You don't mean to say it--is--"

"Yes, yes! My orderly! Lebon!"

"God!" exclaimed the Master. "But--"

A cry from Rrisa interrupted him, a cry that flared down-wind with
strange, wild exultation. The Arab had just risen from the sand, near
the unconscious, in-drifting form of the Sheik, Abd el Rahman.

In his hands he was holding something--holding a leather sack with a
broken cord attached to it. This cord in some way had been severed by
the Sheik's rifle when the old man had fallen. The leather sack had
rolled a few feet away. Now, with hands that shook so that the Arab
could hardly control them, Rrisa was holding out this sack as he
staggered through the blinding sand-storm towards his chief.

"_Al Hamdu Lillah!_" (Praise to the Lord of the Three Worlds!) choked
Rrisa in a strange voice, fighting for his very breath. "See--see what
I--have found!"

Staring, blinking, trying to shelter his eyes against the demons of
the storm, the Master turned toward him.

"What, Rrisa?"

Down into the wady stumbled the Arab, gray-powdered with clinging
sand.

"Oh," he choked, "it has been taken from these _yezid_, these abusers
of the salt! Now we rescue it from these cut-off ones! From the swine
and brothers of the swine it has been taken by Allah, and put back
into the hands of Rrisa, Allah's slave! See, _M'alme_, see!"

The shaking hands extended the leather sack. At it the Master stared,
his face going dead white.

"Thou--dost not mean--?" he stammered.

"Truly, I do!"

"Not Kaukab el Durri?"