As he spoke a troop of wild horsemen galloped down the ravine.

“Hassan,” one of them shouted, “is that the brother of the Queen of the English with you?  Let him ride with us, and you may return in peace.”

“He is my brother, too,” said Hassan.  “Stand aside, you sons of Eblis, or you shall bite the earth.”

A wild shout from every height of the defile was the answer.  Tancred looked up.  The crest on either side was lined with Bedouins, each with his musket levelled.

“There is only one thing for us to do,” said Tancred to Hassan.  “Let us charge through the defile, and die like men!”

Seizing his pistols, he shot the first horseman through the head, and disabled another.  Then he charged down the ravine, and Hassan and his men followed, and scattered the horsemen before them.  The Bedouins fired down on them from the crests, and, in a few moments, the place was filled with smoke, and Tancred could not see a yard around him.  Still he galloped on, and the smoke suddenly drifted, and he found himself at the mouth of the defile, with a few followers behind him.  A crowd of Bedouins were waiting for him.

“Die fighting!  Die fighting!” he shouted.  Then his horse stumbled, stabbed from beneath by a Bedouin dagger, and fell in the sand.  Before he could get his feet out of the stirrups, he was overpowered and bound.

“Don’t hurt him,” said the Bedouin chief.  “Every drop of his blood is worth ten thousand piastres.”

Late that night, as Amalek, the great Rechabite Bedouin sheikh, was sitting before his tent, a horseman rode up to him.

“Salaam,” he cried.  “Sheikh of sheikhs, it is done!  The brother of the Queen of England is your slave!”

“Good!” said Amalek.  “May your mother eat the hump of a young camel!  Is the brother of the queen with Sheikh Salem?”

“No,” said the horseman, “Sheikh Salem is in paradise, and many of our men are with him.  The brother of the Queen of the English is a mighty warrior.  He fought like a lion, but we brought his horse down at last and took him alive.”

“Good!” said Amalek.  “Camels shall be given to all the widows of the men he has killed, and I will find them new husbands.  Go and tell Fakredeen the good news!”

Amalek and Fakredeen would not have cared had they lost a hundred men in the affair.  The Bedouin chief and the emir of Lebanon could bring into the field more than twenty thousand lances, and the capture of Tancred was part of a political scheme which they were engineering for the conquest of Syria.  They knew from Besso that the young English prince was fabulously rich, and, as they wanted arms, they meant to hold him to the extraordinary ransom of two million piastres.

“My foster father will pay it,” said Fakredeen.  “He told me that he would have to rebuild Solomon’s temple if the English prince asked him to.  We will get him to help us rebuild Solomon’s empire.”