Torn with anguish of a great conflict, he pondered, smearing the sweat of agony from his hard-wrinkled forehead.  Better was it to fling these holy things from the cabin window, out into the night?  Better the certainty that the desert sands, far below, would inevitably drift over them, forever burying them from the sight of his people; or better the chance that the Master, after all, really intended to deliver them back into Moslem hands at Bara Jannati Shahr?

“Allah, oh, guide thy servant now!” the orderly prayed with trembling lips.  “Allah, show thou me the way!”

The Master, stirring in his sleep, sighed deeply and let his right hand fall outside the berth.  Rrisa, fearful of imminent discovery, made up his mind with simple directness.  He salaamed in silence, all but brushing the Master’s hand with his lips.

“Wa’salem!” (Farewell!) he breathed.  Then he got up, turned, laid his dagger on the table and slid out through the window as soundlessly as he had come.  He crossed the marrow gallery in the gloom, and mounted the rail beyond which yawned black vacancy.

For a moment he stayed there, peering down first at the impenetrable abysses below, then up at the unmoved stars above.  The ghostly aura of light in the gallery showed his face wan, deep-graven with lines, agonized, ennobled by strong decisions of self-sacrifice.

“Thou, Allah,” he whispered, “dost know life cannot be for both my Master and thy servant, after what thy servant hath seen.  I offer thee my life for his!  Thou wilt judge aright, for thou knowest the hearts of men and wilt wrong no man by the weight of a grain of sand.  Thou art easy to be reconciled, and merciful!  There is no God but Allah, and M’hamed is his Prophet!”

With no further word, he leaped.

Just a fraction of a second, a dim-whirling object plummeted into space.  It vanished.

As best he understood, Rrisa had solved his problem and had paid his score.

The Master wakened early, with the late May sun already Slanting in from far, dun and orange desert-levels, gilding the metal walls of his cabin.  For a few moments he lay there, half dreamily listening to the deep bass hum of the propellers, the slight give and play of the air-liner as she shuddered under the powerful drive of her Norcross-Brail engines.

His thoughts first dwelt a little on yesterday’s battle and on the wondrous treasure now in his hands.  Then they touched the approaching campaign beyond the Iron Mountains in regions never yet seen by any white man’s eye, and for a while enveloped some of the potentialities of that campaign.

But “Captain Alden” recurring to his mind, drove away such stern imaginings.  The Master’s lips smiled, a little; his black eyes softened, and for a moment his face assumed something that might almost have made it akin to those of men who feel the natural passions of the heart.  Never before, in all his stern, hard life, had the Master’s expression been quite as now.