An hour from that time, the air-liner was drifting sideways at low altitudes, hardly five hundred feet above the waves. A sad spectacle she made, her wreckage gilded by the infinite splendors of the sun now lowering toward the horizon. Her helicopters were droning with all the force that could be flung into them from the crippled power-plant. Her propellers—some charred to mere stumps on their shafts—stood starkly motionless.
Oddly awry she hung, driven slowly eastward by the wind. Her rudder was burned clean off; her stern, warped, reeking with white fumes that drifted on the late afternoon air told of the fury that had blazed about her. Flames no longer roared away; but the teeth of their consuming rage had bitten deep. Where the aft observation pit had been, now only a twisted net of metal-work remained, with all the plate-glass melted and cracked away. The body of Gorlitz, trapped there, had mercifully fallen into the sea. That ghastly thing, at any rate, no longer remained.
Four Legionaries were in the pilot-house: the Master, Bohannan,Leclair, and "Captain Alden." For the most part, they held silence.There was little for them to say. At length the major spoke.
"Still sagging down, eh?" he commented, his eyes on the needle of the altimeter. "Some situation! Two men dead and others injured. Engines crippled, propellers the same, and two floats so damaged we couldn't stay on the surface if we came down. Well, by God!"
Leclair looked very grim.
"I regret only," said he in broken English, "that the stowaway escaped us. Ah,la belle exécution, if we had him now!"
The Master, at the starboard window, kept silence. No one sat at the wheel. Of what use could it have been? The Master was looking far to eastward, now with the naked eye, now sweeping the prospect with binoculars. He was studying the African coast, clearly in sight as a long, whitish line of sand with a whiter collar of foamy surf, fifteen miles away.
A few gulls had begun to show—strange, small gulls, yellow-beaked and swift. Off to northward, a native dhow was beating down-wind with full-bellied lateen sail, with matting over its hatches. Heat was beginning to grow intense, for no longer wasNissrmaking a gale that cooled; no longer was she at high, cold levels. Africa, the tropics, had suddenly become real; and the sudden contrast oppressed them all.
Through the shimmering, quivering air, an arid pallor extended up the eastern sky; a pale, milky illumination, dull-white over the desert, that told of the furnace into whichNissrwas drifting—if indeed she could survive till she reached land. The glasses showed tawny reaches of sand, back a little from the coast; and beyond these, low hills, or rather rolling dunes, lay empurpled by vibrant heat-hazes.
"It won't be much like navigating over that Hell-spot, three or four miles in the air," muttered Bohannan. He looked infinitely depressed. The way he gnawed at his red mustache showed how misadventure had raveled his nerve.
No one answered him. Leclair lighted a cigarette, and silently squinted at Africa with eyes long inured to the sun of that land of flame. Alden, at the other window, kept silence, too. That masked face could express no emotion; but something in the sag of the woman's shoulders, the droop of her head, showed how profound and intense was her suffering.
"Faith, are we going to make it, chief?" asked the major, impatiently. Not his the temperament that can wait in silence. He made a singular figure as he lounged there at the pilot-house window, huge elbows on the sill. One hand was wrapped in bandages, well saturated with croton-oil. Chars and burns on his uniform showed where blazing petrol from the final explosion had spattered him.
His eyes, like the Master's, were bloodshot, inflamed. Part of his red crop of hair had been singed off, and all his eyelashes were gone, as well as half his bushy red brows. But the ugly set of his jaw, the savage gleam of his eyes showed that no physical pain was depressing him. His only trouble was the thought that perhaps the expedition of the Flying Legion had ended before it had really begun.
"What chance, sir?" he insisted. "It's damned bad, according to my way of thinking."
"What you think and what you say won't have any weight with this problem of aerial flotation," the Master curtly retorted. "If we make land, we make it, that's all, sir." He relapsed into silence. Leclair muttered, in Arabic—his words audible only to himself—an ancient Islamic proverb: "Allah knows best, and time will show!" Then, after a moment's pause, the single word: "Kismet!"
Silence again, in which the Master's brain reviewed the stirring incidents of the past hour and a half—how the stowaway had evaded Dr. Lombardo's vigilance and (thoroughly familiar with every detail ofNissr) had succeeded in making his way to the aft port fuel-tank, from which he had probably drained petrol through a pet-cock and thereafter set it afire; how the miscreant had then scrambled up the aft companion-ladder, to shoot down the Master himself; and how only a horrible, nightmare fight against the flames had saved even this shattered wreck of the air-liner.
It had all been Kloof's fault, of course, and Lombardo's. Those two had permitted this disaster to befall, and—yes, they should be punished, later. But how? The Master's mind attacked this problem. Each of the four Legionaries in the pilot-house was busy with his own thoughts.
On and on toward the approaching shores of Africa drifted the wounded Eagle of the Sky, making no headway save such as the west wind gave her. Steadily the needle of the altimeter kept falling. The high-pitched drone of the helicopters told that the crippled engines were doing their best; but even that best was not quite enough.
Like a tired creature of the air, the liner lagged, she sank. Before half the distance had been covered to that gleaming beach, hardly six hundred feet lay between the lower gallery ofNissrand the long, white-toothed waves that, slavering, hungered for her gigantic body and the despairing crew she bore.
Suddenly the Master spoke into the engine-room telephone.
"Can you do any better?" exclaimed the chief. "This is not enough!"
"We're doing our best, sir," came the voice of Frazier, now in charge.
"If you can possibly strain a point, in some way, and wring a little more power out of the remaining engines—"
"We're straining them beyond the limit now, sir."
The Master fell silent, pondering. His eyes sought the dropping needle. Then the light of decision filled his eyes. A smile came to his face, where the deep gash made by the splinter of glass had been patched up with collodion and cotton. He plugged in on another line, by the touch of a button.
"Simonds! Is that you?"
"Yes, sir," answered the quartermaster, in charge of all the stores.
"Have you jettisoned everything?"
"All we can spare, sir. All but the absolute minimum of food and water."
"Overboard with them all!"
"But, sir—"
"And drop the body of Auchincloss, too. This is no time for sentiment!"
"But—"
"My order, sir!"
Five minutes later, cases, boxes, bales, water-tanks, began spinning from open ports and down through the trap-door in the lower gallery. Then followed the seared corpse of Auchincloss, a good man who had died in harness, fighting to the end. Those to whom the duty was assigned of giving his metal-weighted body sea burial turned away their eyes, so that they might not see that final plunge. But the sound of the body striking the waves rocketed up to them with sickening distinctness.
Lightened a little,Nissrseemed to rally for a few minutes. The altimeter needle ceased its drop, trembled and even rose.275degrees.
"God! If we only had an ounce more power!" burst out the major, his mouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master remained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened, feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on, on driftedNissr, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight of approaching evening in every detail revealing—as it slanted in, almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic—the ravages wrought by flame.
Bohannan could not long be silent. The exuberance of his nature burst forth with a half-defiant:
"IfIwere in charge, which I'm not, I'd stop those damned helicopters, let her down, turn what power we've got into the remaining propellers, and taxi ashore!"
"And probably sink, or break up in the surf, on the beach, there!" curtly rejoined the Master. "Ah!What?"
His binoculars checked their sweep along the coast, which in its absolute barrenness looked a place of death for whatever might have life there.
"You see something,mon capitaine?" asked Leclair, blowing smoke from his cigarette. "Allow me also to look! Where is it?"
"Just to north of that gash—that wady, or gully, making down to the beach. You see it, eh?"
Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes of that desolation. Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise of shade. No house, no hut was visible. Not even a patch of grass could be discerned. The African coast lay stretched out in ivory nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat, by the beatings of surf eternal.
Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs callsabkhàh, or sheets of gypsum. The setting sun painted all this horror of desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had witnessed from the windows ofNiss'rosh, the night his great plan had come to him. Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed eight years!
Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague edge of the world. Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene—a land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents. Africa, once more seen under such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered at the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.
All at once his glass stopped its sweep.
"Smoke, my Captain!" he exclaimed. "See, it curls aloft like a lady's ringlet. And—beyond the wady—"
"Ah, you see them, too?"
The major's glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now fixed on the indicated spot, as was "Captain Alden's."
"I see them," the Master answered. "And the green flag—the flag of the Prophet—"
"The flag,oui, mon capitaine!There are many men, but—"
"But what, Lieutenant?"
"Ah, do you not see? No horses. No camels. That means their oasis is not far. That means they are not traveling. This is no nomadic moving of the Ahl Bayt. No, no, my Captain. It is—"
"Well, what?"
"A war-party. What you in your language call the—the reception committee,n'est-ce pas?Ah, yes, the reception committee."
"And the guests?" demanded the major.
"The guests are all the members of the Flying Legion!" answered theFrenchman, with another draw at his indispensable cigarette.
"Ah, sure now, but that's fine!" exclaimed the major with delight, his eyes beginning to sparkle in anticipation. "The best of news! A little action, eh? I ask nothing better. All I ask is that we live to reach the committee—live to be properly killed! It's this dying-alive that killsme! Faith, it tears the nerves clean out of my body!"
"That is a true Arab idea, Major," smiled Leclair. "To this extent you are brother to the Bedouin. They call a manfatis, as a reproach, who dies any other way than fighting. May you never—may none of us—ever suffer the disgrace of beingfatis!"
"There's not much danger of that!" put in the Master. "That's a big war-party, and we're drifting ashore almost exactly where they're waiting. From the appearance of the group, they look like Beni Harb people—'Sons of Fighting' you know—though I didn't expect we'd sight any of that breed so far to westward."
"Beni Harb, eh?" echoed the Frenchman, his face going grim. "Ah,mes amis, it is with pleasure I see that race, again!" He sighted carefully through his glass, asNissrsagged on and on, ever closer to the waves, ever nearer the hard, sun-roasted shores of Africa. "Yes, those are Beni Harb men.Dieu! May it be Sheik Abd el Rahman's tribe! May I have strength to repay the debt I owe them!"
"What debt, Lieutenant?" asked the chief.
Leclair shrugged his shoulders.
"A personal matter, my Captain! A personal debt I owe them—with interest!"
"You will have nearly a score and a half of good fighting men to help you settle your account," smiled the Master. Then, to Bohannan: "It looks now, Major, as if you'd have a chance to try your sovereign remedy."
"Faith! Machine-guns, eh?"
"Yes, provided we get near enough to use them."
"No vibrations this time, eh?" demanded the Celt, a bit of good-humored malice in his voice. "Vibrations are all very well in their way, sir, but when it comes to a man-to-man fight—"
"It's not that, Major," the chief interrupted. "We haven't the available power, now, for high-tension current. So we must fall back on lesser means.
"You, sir, and Lieutenant Leclair, get the six gun-crews together at their stations. When we drift in range, give the Beni Harb a few trays of blanks. That may scatter them without any further trouble. We want peace, but if it's got to be war, very well. If they show real fight, rake them hard!"
"They will show fight, surely enough, mon capitaine," put in Leclair, as he and the major made their way to the oddly tiptilted door leading back into the main corridor. "I know these folk. No blank cartridges will scatter that breed. Even the Turks are afraid of them. They have a proverb: 'Feed the Beni Harb, and they will fire at Allah!' That says it all.
"Mohammed laid a special curse on them. I imagine your orderly, Rrisa, will have something to say when he learns that we have Beni Harb as opponents. Now, sir, we shall make all haste to get the machine-guns into action!"
Major Bohannan laughed with more enjoyment than he had shown sinceNissrhad left America. They both saluted and withdrew. When the door was closed again, a little silence fell in the pilot-house, the floor of which had now assumed an angle of nearly thirty degrees. The droning of the helicopters, the drift of the sickly white smoke that—rising fromNissr'sstern—wafted down-wind with her, the drunken angle of her position all gave evidence of the serious position in which the Flying Legion now found itself. Suddenly the Master spoke. His dismissal of Bohannan and Leclair had given him the opportunity he wanted.
"Captain Alden," said he, bruskly, with the unwillingness of a determined man forced to reverse a fixed decision. "I have reconsidered my dictum regarding you."
"Indeed, sir?" asked the woman, from where she stood leaning against the sill of the slanted window. "You mean, sir, I am to stay with the Legion, till the end?"
"Yes. Your service in having shot down the stowaway renders it imperative that I show you some human recognition. You gained admission to this force by deception, and you broke parole and escaped from the stateroom where I had imprisoned you. But, as you have explained to me, you heard the explosion, you heard the outcry of pursuit, and you acted for my welfare.
"I can weigh relative values. I grant your request. The score is wiped clean. You shall remain, on one condition."
"And what is that, sir?" asked "Captain Alden," with a voice of infinite relief.
"That you still maintain the masculine disguise. The presence of a woman, as such, in this Legion, would be a disturbing factor. You accept my terms?"
"Certainly! May I ask one other favor?"
"What favor?"
"Spare Kloof and Lombardo!"
"Impossible!"
"I know their guilt, sir. Through their carelessness in not having discovered the stowaway and in having let him escape, the Legion came near sudden death. I knowNissris a wreck, because of them. Still, we need men, and those two are good fighters. Above all, we need Lombardo, the doctor I ask you to spare them at least their lives!"
"That is the woman's heart in you speaking, now," the chief answered, coldly. His eyes were far ahead, where the war-party was beginning to debouch on the white sands along the shore—full three hundred fighting-men, or more, well armed, as the tiny sparkles of sunlight flicking from weapons proved. AsNissrdrew in to land, the Beni Harb grew visible to the naked eye, like a swarm of ants on the desert rim.
"The woman's heart," repeated the Master. "That is your only fault and weakness, that you are a woman and that you forgive."
"You grant my request?"
"No, Captain. Nor can I even discuss it. Those two men have cut themselves off from the Legion and signed their own death warrant. The sentence I have decided on, must stand. Do not speak of this to me again, madam! Now, kindly withdraw."
"Yes, sir!" And Alden, saluting, approached the door.
"One moment! Send Leclair back to me. Inform Ferrara that he is to command the second gun-crew."
"Yes, sir!" And the woman was gone.
Leclair appeared, some moments later. He suspected nothing of the subterfuge whereby the Master had obtained a few minutes' conversation alone with "Captain Alden."
"You sent for me, sir?" asked the Frenchman.
"I did. I have some questions to ask you. Others can handle the guns, but you have special knowledge of great importance to me. And first, as an expert ace, what are our chances of making that shore, sir, now probably five miles off? In a crisis, I always want to ask an expert's opinion."
Leclair peered from under knit brows at the altimeter needle and the inclinometer. He leaned from the pilot-house window and looked down at the waves, now hardly a hundred feet below, their foaming hiss quite audible. From those waves, red light reflected as the sun sank, illuminated the Frenchman's lean, brown features and flung up wavering patches of illumination against the pilot-house ceiling of burnished metal, through the tilted windows that sheerly overhung the water.
"Eh bien—" murmured Leclair, noncommittally.
"Well, can we make it, sir?"
The ace inspected the vacuum-gauges, the helicopter tachometers, and shrugged his shoulders.
"'Fais tout, toi-même, et Dieu t'aidera,'" he quoted the cynical old French proverb. "If nothing gives way, there is a chance."
"If we settle into the sea, do you think that with our damaged floats we can drive ashore without breaking up?"
"I do not, my Captain. There is a heavy sea running, and the surf is bad on the beach. This Rio de Oro coast is cruel. Have you our exact position?"
"Almost exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, half-way between Cape Bojador to north of us, and Cape Blanco, to south."
"Yes, I understand. That brings us to the Tarmanant region of the Sahara. Fate could not have chosen worse for us. But,c'est la guerre. All I regret, however, is that in a crippled condition we have to face a war-party of the Beni Harb. Were we intact, and a match for them, how gladly would I welcome battle with that scum of Islam! Ah, thecanaille!"
"You call them dogs, eh?" asked the chief. "And why?"
"What else are such apostate fanatics? People who live by robbery and plunder—people who, if they find no gold in your money-belt, will rip your stomach open to see if you've swallowed it! People who boast of beingharami(highwaymen), and who respect thejallah(slave-driver)!
"People who practice the barbaricthar, or blood-feud! People who torture their victims by cutting off the ends of their fingers before beheading or crucifying them! People who glory in murdering the 'idolators of Feringistan,' as they call us white men! Let me advise you now, my Captain, when dealing with these people or fighting them, never use your last shot on them. Always keep a mercy-bullet in your gun!"
"A mercy-bullet?"
"For yourself!"
The Master pondered a moment or two, asNissrdrifted on toward the now densely massed Arabs on the beach, then he said:
"You seem to know these folk well."
"Only too well!"
The Master's next words were in the language of the desert:
"Hadratak tet kal'm Arabi?" (You speak Arabic?)
"Na'am et kal'm!" affirmed the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do,Effendi. Yes, yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the headwaters of the Niger.
"Five years I spent among the Arabs, doing air-work, surveying the Sahara, locating oases, mapping what until then were absolutely unknown stretches of territory. I did a bit of bombing, too, in the campaign against Sheik Abd el Rahman, in 1913."
"Yes, so I have heard. You almost lost your life, that time?"
"Only by the thickness of asemmahseed did I preserve it," answered the Frenchman. "My mechanician, Lebon, and I—we fell among them on account of engine trouble, near the oasis of Adrar, not far from here. We had no machine-gun—nothing but revolvers. We stood them off for seven hours, before they rushed us. They captured us only because our last cartridges were gone."
"You did not save the mercy-bullet that time, eh?"
"I did not,Effendi.I did not know them then as I do now. They knocked us both senseless, and then began hacking our machine to pieces with their hugebalas(yataghans). They thought our plane was some gigantic bird.
"Superstition festers in their very bones! The giant bird, they believed, would ruin their date crops; and, besides, they thirsted for the blood of the Franks. As a matter of fact, my Captain, these people do sometimes drink a little of the blood of a slaughtered enemy."
"Impossible!"
"True, I tell you! They destroyed our plane with fire and sword, reviled us as pigs and brothers of pigs, and named poor Lebon 'kalb ibn kalb,' or 'dog and son of a dog.' Then they separated into two bands. One band departed toward Wady Tawarik, taking Lebon. They informed me that on the morrow they would crucify him on a cross of palm-wood, head downward."
"And they executed Lebon?"
Leclair shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose so," he answered with great bitterness. "I have never seen or heard of him since. As for me, they reserved me for some festivities at Makam Jibrail. During the next night, a column of Spanish troops from Rio de Oro rushed their camp, killed sixty or seventy of the brown demons, and rescued me. Since then I have lusted revenge on the Beni Harb!"
"No wonder," put in the chief, once more looking at the beach, where now the war-party was plainly visible to the naked eye in some detail. The waving of their arms could be distinguished; and plainly glittered the blood-crimson sunset light on rifle-barrels, swords, and javelins. The Master loosened his revolver in its holster. "About twenty minutes from now, at this rate," he added, "some of the Beni Harb will have reason to remember you."
"Yes, and may Jehannum take them all!" exclaimed the Frenchman, passionately. His eyes glowered with hate as he peered across the narrowing strip of waves and surf. "Jehannum, where every time their skins are burned off, as the Koran says, new ones will grow to be burned off again! Where 'they shall have garments of fire fitted upon them and boiling water poured upon their heads, and they shall be beaten with maces of iron—"
"And their tormentors shall say unto them: 'Taste ye the pain of burning!'" the Master concluded the familiar quotation with a smile. "Waste no time in wishing the Beni Harb future pain, my dear Lieutenant. Jehannum may indeed reserve the fruit of the tree Al Zakkum, for these dogs, but our work is to give them a foretaste of it, today. Kismet seems to have willed it that you and the Beni Harb shall meet again. Is it not a fortunate circumstance, for you?"
"Fortunate, yes," the Frenchman answered, his eyes glowing as they estimated the strength of the war-party, now densely massed along the shining sands, "But, thank God, there are no women in this party! That would mean that one of us would have to kill a woman—for God help a woman of Feringistan caught by thesejinnee, these devils of the waste!"
Silence again. Both men studied the Beni Harb. The Frenchman judged, reverting to his native tongue: "Certainly more than three hundred of these 'abusers of the salt,' my Captain. And we are hardly thirty. Even if we reach land, we must soon sink to earth. Without food, water, anything—ce n'est pas gai, hein?"
"No, it is not gay," the chief answered. "But with machine-guns—"
"Machine-guns cannot fight against the African sun, against famine, thirst, delirium, madness. Well—'blessed be certainty,' as the Arabs say."
"You mean death?"
"Yes, I mean death. We always have that in our grasp, at any rate—after having taken full toll of these devils. I should not mind, so much, defeat at the hands of the nobler breed of the Arabian Peninsula. There, in theRuba el Khali[1] itself, I know a chivalric race dwells that any soldier might be proud to fight or to rule over. But these Shiah heretic swine—ah, see now, they are taking cover already? They will not stand and fight, like men!"
[Footnote 1:Ruba el Khali(The Empty Abodes), a name applied by the Arabs to the Peninsula, especially the vast inner region never penetrated by any white man.]
Scornfully he flung a hand at the Beni Harb. The fringes of the tribe were trickling up the sands, backward, away, toward the line of purple-hazed dunes that lined the coast. More and more of the war-party followed. Gradually all passed up the wady, over the dunes and vanished.
"They are going to ambush us, my Captain," said Leclair. "'In rice, strength; in the Beni Harb, manhood!'"
Nearer the land, ever sagging down but still afloat—though now at times some of the heavier surges broke in foam over the rail of the lower gallery—the Eagle of the Sky drifted on, on. Hardly a half-mile now lay between air-liner and shore. Suddenly the Master began to speak:
"Listen, Lieutenant! Events are at a crisis, now. I will speak very plainly. You know the Arabs, good and bad. You know Islam, and all that the Mohammedan world is. You know there are more than 230,000,000 people of this faith, scattered from Canton to Sierra Leone, and from Cape Town to Tobolsk, all over Turkey, Africa, and Arabia—an enormous, fanatic, fighting race! Probably, if trained, the finest fighting-men in the world, for they fear neither pain nor' death. They welcome both, if their hearts are enlisted!"
"Yes, yes, I know! Their Hell yawns for cowards; their Paradise opens to receive the brave! Death is as a bride to the Moslem!"
"Fanatics all, Lieutenant! Only a few white men have ever reached Mecca and returned. Bartema, Wild, and Joseph Pitt succeeded, and so did Hurgronje, Courtelmont, Burton, and Burckhardt—though, the Arabs admit only the two last.
"But how many hundreds have been beheaded or crucified? No pilgrimage ever takes place without a few such victims. A race of this type is a potential world-power of incalculable magnitude. Men who will die for Islam and for their master without a quiver—"
"My Captain! What do you mean?"
The lieutenant's eyes had begun to fill with flame. His hand tightened to a fist.
"Mon Dieu, what do you mean? Can it be possible you dream of ruling the races of Islam?"
Something whined overhead, from the beach now only about a quarter-mile distant. Then a shot from behind the dunes cracked out across the crumbling, hissing surf.
"Ah," laughed Leclair, "the ball has opened, eh? Well this is now no time for talk, for empty words. I think I understand you, my Captain; and to the death I stand at your right hand!"
Their palms met and clasped, a moment, in the firm grip of a compact between two strong men, unafraid. Then each drew his pistol, crouching there at the windows of the pilot-house.
"Hear how that bullet sang?" questioned the Frenchman. "It was notched—a notched slug, you understand. That is a familiar trick with these dog-people of the Beni Harb. Sometimes, if they have poison, they dip the notched slug in that too. And, ah, what a wound one makes! Dum-dums are a joke beside such!"
Another shot sounded. Many cracked out along the dune. All up and down the crest of the tawny sand-hills, red under the sun now close to the horizon, the fusillade ran and rippled. OnNissr, metal plates rang with the impact of the slugs, or glass crashed. The gigantic Eagle of the Sky, helpless, received this riddling volley as she sagged ashore, now almost in the grip of the famished surf.
"Yes, the ball is opening!" repeated Leclair, with an eager laugh. His finger itched on the trigger of his weapon; but no target was visible. Why waste ammunition on empty sand-dunes?
"Let it open!" returned the chief. "We'll not refuse battle, no, by Allah! Our first encounter with Islam shall not be a surrender! Even if we could survive that, it would be fatal to this vast plan of mine—of ours, Lieutenant. No, we will stand and fight—even till 'certainty,' if Allah wills it so!"
A sudden burst of machine-gun fire, from the upper starboard gallery, crashed out into the sultry, quivering air. The kick and recoil of the powerful Lewis sent a fine, swift shudder through the fabric of the wounded Eagle.
"There goes a tray of blanks," said the Master. "Perhaps that will rout them out, eh? Once we can get them on the run—"
Leclair laughed scornfully.
"Those dog-sons will not run from blanks, no, nor from shotted charges!" he declared. "Pariahs in faith, despoilers of the Haram—the sacred inner temple—still this breed ofRafaz(heretic) is bold. Ah, 'these dogs bare their teeth to fight more willingly than to eat.' It will come to hot work soon, I think!"
Keenly he scanned the dunes, eager for sight of a whitetarboosh, or headgear, at which to take a pot-shot. Nothing was visible but sand—though here, there, a gleam of steel showed where the Arabs had nested themselves down in the natural rampart with their long-barreled rifles cuddled through carefully scooped rifts in the sand.
Again the machine-gun chattered. Another joined it, but no dust-spurts leaped from the dune, where now a continual play of fire was leaping out. The Beni Harb, keenly intelligent, sensed either that they were being fired at with blanks, or that the marksmanship aboard the air-liner was execrable. A confused chorus of cries and jeers drifted down from the sand-hills; and all at once a tall, gaunt figure in a brown and white striped burnous, with the hood drawn up over the head, leaped to sight.
This figure brandished a tremendously long rifle in his left hand. His right was thrust up, with four fingers extended—the sign of wishing blindness to enemies. A splendid mark this Arab made. The Master drew a fine bead on him and fired.
Both he and Leclair laughed, as the Arab pitched forward in the sand. Unseen hands dragged the warrior back, away, out of sight. A slug crashed through the upper pane of the port window, flattened itself against the main corridor door and dropped to the sofa-locker.
The Master reached for the phone and switched in the connection with the upper starboard gallery.
"Major Bohannan!" he ordered. "No more blanks! The real thing, now—but hold your fire till we drift over the dune!"
"Drift over!" echoed Leclair. "But,monsieur, we'll never even make the beach!"
"So?" asked the chief. He switched to the engine-room.
"Frazier! Lift her a little, now! Rack everything—strain everything—break everything, if you must, but lift her!"
"Yes, sir!" came the engineer's voice. "I'll scrap the engines, sir, but I'll do that!"
Almost as if a mocking echo of the command and the promise, a dull concussion shuddered throughNissr. The drone of the helicopters sank to a sullen murmur; and down below, waves began combing angrily over the gallery.
"Ah,nom de Dieu!" cried Leclair, in sudden rage at seeing his chance all gone to pot, of coming to grips with the hated Beni Harb. From the penetralia of the air-liner, confused shouts burst forth. The upper galleries grew vocal with execrations.
Not one was of fear; all voiced disappointment, the passion of baffled fury. Angrily a boiler-shop clatter of machine-guns vomited useless frenzy.
Wearily, like a stricken bird that has been forced too long to wing its broken way, the Eagle of the Sky—still two hundred yards from shore—lagged down into the high-running surf. Down, in a murderous hail of fire she sank, into the waves that beat on the stark, sun-baked Sahara shore.
And from hundreds of barbarous throats arose the killing-cry toAllah—the battle-cry of Beni Harb, the murder-lusting Sons of War.
"La Illaha illa Allah! M'hámed rasul Allah!" Raw, ragged, exultant, a scream of passion, joy, and hate, it rose like the voice of the desert itself, vibrant with wild fanaticism, pitiless and wild.
The wolflike, high-pitched howl of the Arab outcasts—the robber-tribe which all Islam believed guilty of having pillaged the Haram at Mecca and which had for that crime been driven to the farthest westward confines of Mohammedanism—this war-howl tore its defiance through the wash and reflux of the surf.
The pattering hail of slugs continued to zoon from the sand-hills, bombarding the vast-spread wings and immense fuselage of Nissr. For the most part, that bombardment was useless to the Beni Harb. A good many holes, opened up in the planes, and some broken glass, were about the Arabs' only reward.
None of the bullets could penetrate the metal-work, unless making a direct hit. Many glanced, spun ricochetting into the sea, and with a venomous buzzing like huge, angry hornets, lost themselves in quick, white spurts of foam.
But one shot at least went home. Sheltered though the Legion was, either inside the fuselage or in vantage-points at the gun-stations, one incautious exposure timed itself to meet a notched slug. And a cry of mortal agony rose for a moment on the heat-shimmering air—a cry echoed with derision by fifteen score barbarians behind their natural rampart.
There was now no more shooting from the liner. What was there to shoot at, but sand? The Arabs, warned by the death of the gaunt fellow in the burnous, had doffed their headgear. Their brown heads, peeping intermittently from the wady and the dunes, were evasive as a mirage.
The Master laughed bitterly.
"A devil of a place!" he exclaimed, his blood up for a fight, but all circumstances baffling him. A very different man, this, from the calm, impersonal victim of ennui atNiss'rosh, or even from the unmoved individual when the liner had first swooped away from New York. His eye was sparkling now, his face was pale and drawn with anger; and the blood-soaked cotton and collodion gave a vivid touch of color to the ensemble. That the Master had emotions, after all, was evident. Obvious, too, was the fact these emotions were now fully aroused. "What a devil of a place! No way to get at those dog-sons, and they can lie there and wait forNissrto break up!"
"Yes, my Captain, or else starve us where we lie!" the lieutenant put in. "Or wait for thirst and fever to do the work. Then—rich plunder for the sons of theft!"
"Ah, Leclair, but we're not going to stay here, for any such contingency!" exclaimed the chief, and turned toward the door. "Come,en avant! Forward, Leclair!"
"My Captain! You cannot charge an entrenched enemy like that, by swimming a heavy surf, with nothing but revolvers in hand!"
"Can't, eh? Why not?"
"The rules of war—"
"To Hell with the rules of war!" shouted the Master, for the first time in years breaking into profanity. "Are you with me, or are you—"
"Sir, do not say that word!" cried the Frenchman, reddening ominously."Not even from you can I accept it!"
The Master laughed again, and strode out into the main corridor, withLeclair close behind him.
"Men!" he called, his voice blaring a trumpet-call to action."Volunteers for a shore-party to clean out that kennel of dogs!"
None held back. All came crowding into the spacious corridor, its floor now laterally level but sloping toward the stern, asNissr'sdamaged aft-floats had filled and sunk.
"Revolvers and lethal pistols!" he ordered. "And knives in belts! Come on!"
Up the ladder they swarmed to the take-off gallery. Their feet rang and clattered on the metal rounds. Other than that, a, strange silence filled the giant air-liner. The engines now lay dead.Nissrwas motionless, save for the pitch and swing of the surf that tossed her; but forward she could no longer go.
As the men came up to the top gallery, the hands of the setting sun reached out and seized them with red ardor. The radiance was half blinding, from that sun and from light reflected by the heavily running waves, all white-caps to shore. On both aileron-tips, the machine-guns were spitting intermittently, worked by crews under the major and Ferrara, the Italian ace.
"Cease firing!" ordered the Master. "Simonds, you and Prisrend deal out the lethal guns. Look alive, now!"
Sheltering themselves from the patter of slugs behind stanchions and bulwarks, the Legionaries waited. The sea wind struck them with hot intensity; the sun, now almost down, flung its river of blood from ship to horizon, all dancing in a shimmer of heat.
By the wayNissrwas thumping her floats on the bottom, she seemed about to break up. But, undismayed, the Legionaries armed themselves, girt on their war-gear and, cool-disciplined under fire, waited the order to leap into the sea.
Not even the sight of a still body in the starboard gallery—a body from under which a snaky red line was crawling, zigzagging with each pitch of the liner—gave them any pause. This crew was well blooded, ready for grim work of give-and-take.
"A task for me, sir!" exclaimed "Captain Alden," pointing at the body.The Master refused.
"No time for nursing, now!" he negatived the plea. "Unless you choose to remain behind?"
"Never, sir!"
"Can you swim with one arm?"
"With both tied!"
"Very well! All ready, men! Overboard, to the beach! There, dig in for further orders. No individual action! No charge, without command! Overboard—come on—who follows me?"
He vaulted the rail, plunged in a white smother, surged up and struck out for shore. Rrisa was not half a second behind him. Then came all the others (save only that still figure on the buffed metals), a deluge of leaping, diving men.
The surf suddenly became full of heads and shoulders, vigorous arms, fighting beachward. Strong swimmers every one, the Legion battled its way ashore, out from underNissr'svast-spreading bulk, out from under her forward floats. Not one Legionary but thrilled with the killing-lust, the eager spur of vengeance for Kloof, first victim of the Beni Harb's attack.
Along the dune, perhaps five hundred yards back of the beach, very many heads now appeared. The Arabs well knew themselves safe from attack, so long as these hated white swine ofAjam[1] were in the breakers. Golden opportunity to pick them off, at ease!
[Footnote 1: Arabs divide the world into two categories; themselves, andAjam, or all non-Arabs.]
A long, ragged line of desert men appeared, in burnouses andbenishes, or loose floating garments, and all heavily armed. The last bleeding rays of the sunset flickered on the silver-mounted rifles as they spat fire into the heat-quivering air.
All about the swimmers, waterspouts jetted up. Two men grunted, flailed wild arms and sank, with the water about them tinged red as the sunset. Another sank face downward, a moment, then with only one arm, continued to ply for land, leaving a crimson trail behind.
None of the untouched Legionaries took any heed of this, or stopped their furious swimming to see what damage had been done or to offer help. Life was at stake. Every second in the breakers was big with death. This was stern work, to be put through with speed. But the faces of the swimming men grew hard to look upon.
The Master and Leclair were first to touch foot to the shelving bottom, all churned up by the long cavalry-charges of the sea-horses, and to drag themselves out of the smother. Rrisa and Bohannan came next, then Enemark, and then the others—all save Beziers and Daimamoto, French ace and Japanese surgeon, whose work was forever at an end. Enemark, engineer and scientist, shot through the left shoulder, was dragged ashore, strangling, by eager hands.
"Down! Down!" shouted the Master. "Dig in!"
Right well he knew the futility, the suicidal folly of trying to charge some three hundred entrenched men with a handful of panting, exhausted soldiers armed only with revolvers.
"Take cover!" his cry rang along the beach. They obeyed. Under a galling fire that flung stinging sand into their faces and that took toll of two more Legionaries, wounded, the expedition dug for its very life.
The best of strategy! The only strategy, the Master knew, as—panting a little, with thick, black hair glued by sea-water to his head—he flattened himself into a little depression in the sand, where the first ripple of the dunes began.
Hot was the sand, and dry. Withered camel-grass grew in dejected tufts here, there, interspersed with a few straggles of half a. A jackal's skull, bleached, lay close to the Master's right hand. Its polish attested the care of others of its kind, of hyenas, and of vultures. Just so would a human skull appear, in no long time, if left to nature's tender ministrations. Out of an eyehole of the skull a dusty gray scorpion half crawled, then retreated, tail over back, venomous, deadly.
Death lurked not alone in sea and in the rifles of the inhabitants of this harsh land, but even in the crawling things underfoot.
The Master paid no heed to shriveled grass, to skull, or scorpion. All his thoughts were bent on the overcoming of that band of Islamic outcasts now persistently pot-shotting away at the strange flying men from unknown lands "that faced not Mecca nor kept Ramadan"—men already hidden in swiftly scooped depressions, from which the sand still kept flying up.
"Steady, men!" the Master called. "Get your wind! Ready with the lethal guns! Each gun, one capsule. Then we'll charge them! And—no quarter!"
Again, silence from the Legion. The fire from the dunes slackened. These tactics seemed to have disconcerted the Beni Harb. They had expected a wild, only half-organized rush up the sands, easily to be wiped out by a volley or two from the terribly accurate, long-barreled rifles. But this restraint, this business-like entrenching reminded them only too forcibly of encounters with other men of the Franks—the white-clad Spanish infantry from Rio de Oro, the dreadedpiou-pious, zouaves, andLégion Etrangèreof the French.
Firing ceased, from the Beni Harb. Silence settled on both sides. From the sea, the noise of waves breaking along the lower works ofNissrmingled with the hiss and refluent slither of the tumbling surf on the gleaming beach. For a while peace seemed to have descended.
A purple shade settled over the desert. The sun was nearly gone, now, and dusk would not be long in closing its chalice down over the light-wearied world. Leclair, entrenched beside the Master, whispered:
"They do not understand, these dog-brothers—may Allah make their faces cold!" He grinned, frankly, with sparkling eyes and white teeth. "Already we have their beards in our hands!"
The Master's only answer was to draw from his pocket an extra lethal gun, hand it over and, in a whisper, hastily instruct the Frenchman how to use it. Then he cried, loudly:
"Ready, men! Fire!"
All along the line, the faint, sighing hiss of the strange weapons sounded. Over the top of the dune little, almost inaudible explosions began taking place as—plop! plop! plop!—the capsules burst. Not now could their pale virescence be seen; but the Master smiled again, at realization that already the lethal gas was settling down upon the horde of Shiah outcasts.
To Leclair he whispered in Arabic an ancient saying of the desert folk: "'Allah hath given skill to three things, the hands of the Chinese, the brains of the Franks, the tongues of the Arabs!'" He added: "When the gas strikes them, they would think the Frankish brain more wonderful than ever—if they could think at all!"
He slid his hand into the breast of his jacket, pulled a little cord and drew out a silver whistle, the very same that he had used at Gallipoli. As he slid it to his lips, they tautened. A flood of memories surged over him. His fighting-blood was up, like that of all the other Legionaries in that hasty trench-line along the white sand-drifts.
A moment's silence followed. Outwardly, all was peace. No sound but the waves broke the African stillness. A little sand-grouse, known askataby the Arabs, came whirring by. Far aloft, a falcon wheeled, keen-eyed for prey. Once more the deadly scorpion peeped from the skull, an ugly, sullen, envenomed thing.
The Master held up the silver whistle, glinting in the last sun-glow. They saw it, and understood. All hearts thrilled, tightening with the familiar sense of discipline. Fists gripped revolver-butts; feet shuffled into the sand, getting a hold for the quick, forward leap.
Keenly trilled the whistle. A shout broke from some twenty-five throats. The men leaped up, forward, slipping, staggering in the fine sand, among the bunches of dried grass. But forward they drove, and broke into a ragged, sliding charge up the breast of the dunes.
"Hold your fire, men! Hold it—then give 'em Hell!" the Master shouted. He was in the first wave of the assault. Close by came Rrisa, his brown face contracted with fanatic hate of the Beni Harb, despoilers of the Haram sanctuary.
There, too, was "Captain Alden," grim with masked face. There was Bohannan, Leclair—and pistol-barrels flickered in the evening glow, and half the men gripped knives in their left hands, as well. For this was to be a killing without quarter, to the very end.
Panting, with a slither of dry sand under their laboring feet, the Legionaries charged. At any second, a raking volley might burst from the dunes. The lethal pellets—so few in this vast space—might not have taken effect. Not one heart there but was steeling itself against ambush and a shriveling fire.
Up they stormed. The Master's voice cried, once more: "Give 'em Hell!"
He was the first man to top the dune, close to the wady's edge. There he checked himself, revolver in mid-air, eyes wide with astonishment. This way and that he peered, squinting with eyes that did not understand.
"Nom de Dieu!" ejaculated Leclair, at his side.
"Wallah!" shouted Rrisa, furiously. "Oh, may Allah smite their faces!"
Each man, as he leaped to the rampart top, stood transfixed with astonishment. Most of them cried out in their native tongues.
Their amazement was well-grounded. Not an Arab was to be seen. Of all those Beni Harb, none remained—not even the one shot by the Master. The sand on the dune was cupped with innumerable prints of feet in rudebabooshes(native shoes), and empty cartridges lay all about. But not one of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, was visible.
"Sure, now, can you beat that?" shouted Bohannan, exultantly, and waved his service cap. "Licked at the start! They quit cold!"
Sheffield, at his side, dropped to the sand, his heart drilled by a jagged slug. The explosion of that shot crackled in from another line of dunes, off to eastward—a brown, burnt ridge, parched by the tropic sun of ages.
Sweating with the heat and the exertion of the charge, amazed at having found—in place of windrows of sleeping men—an enemy still distant and still as formidable as ever, the Legionaries for a moment remained without thought or tactics.
Rrisa, livid with fury and baffled hate, flung up wild arms and began screaming the most extravagant insults at the still invisible nomads, whose fire was now beginning again all along their line.
"O rejected ones, and sons of the rejected!" the Arab howled. "O hogs and brothers of hogs!" He fell to gnawing his own hand, as Arabs will in an excess of passion. Once more he screamed: "O Allah, deny not their skin and bones to the eternal flame! O owls, oxen, beggars, cut-off ones! Oh, give them the burning oil, Allah! The cold faces! Oh, wither their hands! Make themkusah! (beardless). Oh, these swine with black livers, gray eyes, beards of red. Vilest that ever hammered tent-pegs, goats of El Akhfash! O Beni Harb![1]"
[Footnote 1: Beni Harb, or Sons of Battle, by a change in the aspiration of the "H," becomes "Sons of Flight, or Cowardice."]
The Master gripped his furious orderly, and pushed him back, down the slope.
"No more of that, Rrisa!" he commanded, fiercely. "These be old woman's ways, these screamings! Silence,Bismillah!"
He hailed the others.
"They score, the first round! Their game is to retreat, if they're suspicious of any ruse or any attack from us. They're not going to stand and fight. We can't get near enough to them to throw the remaining lethal capsules over. And we can't chase them into the desert. Their plan is to hold us here, and pick us off one by one—wipe us out, without losing a man!
"Dig in again! That's our only game now. We're facing a situation that's going to tax us to the utmost, but there's only one thing to do—dig in!"
Life itself lay in digging, death in exposure to the fire of those maddeningly elusive, unseen Bedouins. Like so many dogs the Legionaries once more fell to excavating, with their knives and their bare hands, the sun-baked sand that slithered back again into their shallow trench almost as fast as they could throw it out.
A ragged fire from the Beni Harb lent speed to their efforts. Dead men and wounded could now have no attention. Life itself was all at stake.
In their rude trench they lay at last, sweating, panting, covered with sand and dust, with thirst beginning to take hold on them, and increasing swarms of flies—tiny, vicious, black things, all sting and poison—beginning to hum about them. On watch they rested there, while dull umbers of nightfall glowered through the framework ofNissr, tossing in the surf. Without much plan, wrecked, confronted by what seemed perils unsurmountable, the Flying Legion waited for the coming of dark to respite them from sniping.
The Master, half-way along the line with Leclair, Rrisa, the major and"Captain Alden," mentally took stock of losses thus far sustained. Thewounded were: Alden, Bohannan (burned), Enemark and himself. The dead:Kloof, Sheffield, Beziers, Travers, Gorlitz, Auchincloss, Daimamoto.
Twenty-four living remained, including Leclair. The mortality, in about eighteen hours, had been twenty percent. At this rate the Master understood the Flying Legion was slated for very speedy destruction.
"It's touch-and-go now," he pondered. "We've got to annihilate these infernal Bedouins, repair the liner and get ahead, or—but there's no 'or' in this! None, at all!"
As dark settled down over the Sahara, the leprous patches of white, saline earth took on a ghostly pallor. The light of the southern stars began to glow with soft radiance. A gigantic emptiness, a rolling vacancy of sea and earth—brine-waves to rear of the Legion, sand-waves ahead—shrank the party to seeming insignificance.
A soft, purple tapestry of night unrolled across the desert; the wind died, and the suffocating breath of overheated sands began to emanate from the baked earth. And ever more and more pestiferously the infernal torment of the flies increased.
Inflamed with chagrin, rage, and grief for the lost comrades, the Legionaries lay in waiting. No conversation ran along the line. Silence held them—and their own thoughts. Wounds had been dressed as well as they might be. Nothing remained but to await the Master's next command.
"Captain Alden's" suggestion that Kloof, still lying aboard in the liner, should be seen to, met a rebuff from the Master. Living or dead, one man could not now endanger the lives of any others. And that danger still lay in any exposure was proved by the intermittent firing from the Arab lines.
The Beni Harb were obviously determined to hold back any possibility of a charge, or any return to the protection of the giant flying-ship. Bullets whimpered overhead, spudded into the sand, or pinged against metal on the liner. Parthian fighters though these Beni Harb were, they surely were well stocked with munitions and they meant stern business.
"And stern business is what they shall have, once the dark is complete," the Master pondered. "It is annihilation for them or for us. There can be no compromise, nor any terms but slaughter!"
One circumstance was favorable—the falling of the wind. Had it risen, kicking up a harsher surf,Nissrmust have begun to break. But as the cupped hand of night, closing over the earth, had also shut away the wind, the air-liner was now resting more easily. Surf still foamed about her floats and lower gallery—surf all spangled with the phosphorescence that the Arabs call "jewels of the deep"—but unless some sudden squall should fling itself against the coast, every probability favored the liner taking no further damage.
In silence, save for the occasional easing of positions along the trench, the Legionaries waited. Strange dim colors appeared along the desert horizons, half visible in the gloom—funeral palls of dim purple, with pale, ghostly reflections almost to mid-heaven.
Some of the men had tobacco and matches that had escaped being wet; and cigarettes were rolled, passed along, lighted behind protections that would mask the match-gleam from the enemy. The comforting aroma of smoke drifted out on the desert heat. As for the Master, from time to time he slipped a khat leaf into his mouth, and remained gravely pondering.
At length his voice sounded along the trench.
"Men of the Flying Legion," said he, "this situation is grave. We can't escape on foot, north or south. We are without provisions or water. The nearest white settlement is Rio de Oro, about a hundred miles to southward; and even if we could reach that, harassed by the Beni Harb, we might all be executed there, as pirates. We must go forward or die right here on this beach.
"In any kind of a straight fight, we are hopelessly out-classed. There are about three hundred men against twenty-four of us, some of whom are wounded. Even if we took life for life, the Bedouins would lose less than ten percent, and we'd be wiped out. And we couldn't expect to take life for life, charging a position like theirs in the night. It can't be a stand-up battle. It's got to be science against savagery, or nothing."
A murmur of approval trickled along the sands. Confidence was returning. The Legionaries' hearts tautened again with faith in this strange, this usually silent and emotionless man whose very name was unknown to almost all of them.
"Just one other word," the Master continued, his voice calm, unshaken, quite impersonal. "If science fails, do not allow yourselves to be captured. The tortures of Hell await any white man taken by these fanatics. Remember, always keep one mercy-bullet—for yourselves!"
Another little silence. Then the chief said:
"I am going to take two men and undertake what seems a preposterous attack. I need only two. I shall not call for volunteers, because you would all offer yourselves. You must stay here."
"In case my plan succeeds, you are to come at my call—three long hails. If my plan fails, Major Bohannan will command you; and I know you will all fight to the last breath and to the final drop of blood!"
"Don't do this thing, sir!" the major protested. "What chance ofsuccess has it? These desert men can see, where a white man is blind.They can scent danger as a hunting-dog scents the spoor of game.You're simply throwing your life away, and we need that life!"
"I will take Lieutenant Leclair, who knows these people," the Master continued, paying no heed, "and Rrisa, who is of their kin. You others, all sit tight!"
A chuckling laugh, out there on the vague sands, seemed to mock him. It burst into a raw, barking cachinnation, that somehow stirred the blood with shrinking horror.
"One of the Sahara Sanitary Corps," remarked Leclair, dryly. "A hyena. Well may he laugh! Feasting enough for him and his before this dance is over!"
A gleam of fire, off to the left where the farther dunes approached the sea, suddenly began to show. All eyes turned toward it. The little fire soon grew into a leaping flame, its base hidden by sand-mounds.
No Arabs were visible there, but they had surely lighted it, using driftwood from the beach. Up into the purple-velvet night whirled sparks and fire-tongues; red smoke spiraled on the vagrant desert breeze.
"A signal-fire, Master!" whispered Rrisa. "It will be seen in far oases. If it burn two hours, that will mean an enemy with great plunder. Others of the Beni Harb will come; there will be gathering of the tribes. That fire must not burn,M'almé!"
"Nor must the Beni Harb live!" To the major: "Collect a dozen lethal guns and bring them to me!"
When the guns were at hand, the Master apportioned them between Leclair, Rrisa, and himself. With the one apiece they already had, each man carried five of the guns, in pockets and in belt. The small remaining stock of lethal pellets were distributed and the weapons fully loaded.
"In three minutes, Major," said the Master, "we leave these lines.Ten minutes after that, open a scattering fire, all along the trench.Shoot high, so as to be sure we are not hit."
"Ah, a barrage, sir?" the major exclaimed.
"Not in the least. My purpose is quite different. Never mind, but listen to my orders. Keep up that fire sparingly, for five minutes. Then cease. And keep silent till we return.
"Remember, I will give three long hails when we start to come back.Those will warn you not to shoot if you see dim figures in the night.Either we shall be back in these lines by nine o'clock, or—"
"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 todestroy thebeni kalb(dog-sons), I would pass through Al Araf, intoEblis! What will be, must be. No man dieth except by permission ofAllah, according to what is written on the scrolls of the angel, AlSijil.
"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.Tawakkàl 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'almé!"
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 theSahara itself, the three companions in arms—American, French,Arab—slid out of the shallow trench, and in the gloom were lost tosight of the beleaguered Flying Legion.
Their mission of death, death to the Beni Harb or to themselves, had begun.