Bara Miyan, clapping his hands again, summoned three horsemen who dismounted and came to him.  By the emerald color of their head-fillets and jackets, as well as by their tonsure, the Master recognized them as mystics of the class known as Sufis.

That he was about to face a redoubtable test could not be doubted.  Long experience with Orientals had taught him the profundity of their legerdemain, practically none of which ever has been fathomed by white men.  The Master realized that all his powers might be tried to the utmost to match and overcome the demonstration of the Jannati Shahr folk.

While Bara Miyan stood talking to the three Sufis, the Master was in a low voice instructing his own men.

“Everything now depends on the outcome of the approaching contest,” said he.  “These people, irrespective of what we show them, will probably evince no surprise.  If we allow any sign or word of astonishment to escape us, no matter what they do, they will consider us beaten and we shall lose all.  There must be no indication of surprise, among you.  Remain impassive, at all costs!” He turned to Brodeur, and in French warned him: 

“Remember the signals, now.  One mistake on your part may cost my life—­more than that, the lives of all the Legion.  Remember!”

“Count on me, my Captain!” affirmed Brodeur.  The masked woman, coming to the Master’s side, said also in French: 

“I have one favor to ask of you!”

“Well, what?”

“Your life is worth everything, now.  Mine, nothing.  Let me subject myself—­”

He waved her away, and making no answer, turned to the Olema.

“Hast thou, O Bara Miyan,” he asked in a steady voice, “a swordsman who can with one blow split a man from crown to jaw?”

“Thou speakest to such a one, White Sheik!”

“Take, then, a simitar of the keenest, and cut me down!”

The old man turned, took from the hand of a horseman a long, curved blade of razor-keenness and with a heavy back.  The Master glanced significantly at Brodeur, who knelt by the switchboard with one steady hand on a brass lever, the other on the control of a complex ray-focussing device.

Toward Bara Miyan the Master advanced across the turf.  He came close.  For a moment the two men eyed each other silently.

“Strike, son of the Prophet!” cried the Master.

Up whirled the Olema’s blade, flickering in the sun.  The metallic click of the brass switch synchronized with that sweep; Brodeur shifted the reflector by the fraction of a degree.

Bara Miyan’s arm grew rigid, quivered a second, then dropped inert.  From his paralyzed hand the simitar fell to the grass.  Brodeur threw off the ray; and the Master, unsmiling, stooped, picked up the blade and with a salaam handed it back, hilt-first, to the old man.

Only with his left hand could Bara Miyan accept it.  He spoke no word, neither did any murmur run through the massed horsemen.  But the shadow of a deep astonishment could not quite veil itself in the profound caverns of the old man’s eyes.