Five minutes later the Master once more paused.

“Remember, both of you,” he cautioned, “not one word of the find!”

“The Great Pearl Star?” asked Leclair gruntingly.

Their voices were almost inaudible to each other in that mad tumult.  “That is to be a secret, my Captain?”

“Between us three; yes.  Let that be understood!”

“I pledge my honor to it!” cried the Frenchman.  Rrisa added:  “The Master has but to command, and it is done!” Then once more they plowed on down the shore.

Only a few minutes more brought them, with surprising suddenness, to the end of the Legionaries’ trench.  Trench it no longer was, however.  All the paltry digging had been swiftly filled in by the sand-devils; and now the men were lying under the lee of the dunes, protecting themselves as best they could with the tunics of their uniforms over their heads.

They got up and came stumbling in confusion to greet the returning trio.  Peering in the dark, straining their eyes to see, they listened to a few succinct words of the Master: 

“Perfect success!  Lethalizing was complete.  Sand has buried the entire tribe.  Leclair found his former orderly, who had been their slave.  We have here their Sheik, Abd el Rahman.  Nothing more to fear.  Down, everybody—­tunics over heads again—­let the storm blow itself out!”

The Legion lay for more than an hour, motionless, waiting in the night.  During this hour both Lebon and the old Sheik recovered consciousness, but only in a vague manner.  There was no attempt to tell them anything, to make any plans, to start any activities.  In a Sahara simoom, men are content just to live.

CHAPTER XXVII

TOIL AND PURSUIT

Before midnight the storm died with a suddenness even greater than that of its onset.  Like a tangible flock of evil birds or of the spirits Victor Hugo has painted in Les Djinns, the sand-storm blew itself out to sea and vanished.  The black sky opened its eyes of starlight, once again; gradually calm descended on the desert, and by an hour after midnight the steady east wind had begun to blow again.

The “wolf’s tail,” or first gray streak of dawn along the horizon, found the Legion all astir.  Lebon had long since been told of his rescue; he and his lieutenant had embraced and had given each other a long story—­the enslaved man’s story making Leclair’s face white with rage, his heart a furnace of vengeance on all Islam.

The Sheik, dimly understanding that these devils of Feringistan had by their super-magic overwhelmed him and his tribe with sleep-magic and storm-magic of the strongest, lay bound hand and foot, sullenly brooding.  No one could get a word from Abd el Rahman; not even Rrisa, who exhausted a wonderful vocabulary of imprecation on him, until the Master sternly bade him hold his peace.

A gaunt, sunken-eyed old hawk of the desert he lay there in the sand, unblinkingly defiant.  Tortures and death, he felt, were to be his portion; but with the stoicism of the barbarian he made no sound.  What his thoughts were, realizing the loss of tribesmen, capture, despoilment of the Great Pearl Star, who could tell?