“The sacred pigs!” ejaculated Leclair.  “Ah, messieurs, now you begin to know the Arabs as I have long known them.”  With eyes of hate and pain he peered back at the darkening line of the Iron Mountains.

Bohannan, already loosening the neck of his goat-skin, laughed hoarsely.

“No wine!” he croaked, “and the water’s rationed; even the stinking water.  But the food isn’t—­good reason, too; there isn’t any.  Pockets full of gems!” He slapped one hard pocket.  “I’d swap the lot for a proper pair of shoes and a skin o’ that wine!  Faith—­that wine, now—­”

The woman suddenly sat up, too, one hand on the hot gravel, the other raised for silence.

“Hark!” she whispered.  “Sh!”

“What now?” demanded the Master.

“Bells!  Camel-bells!”

“Nom d’un, nom!” And the lieutenant drew his gun.

The five fugitives stiffened for another battle.  They looked well to their weapons.  The Master’s weariness and pain were forgotten as he crawled on hands and knees up the side of the little wady.  The sound of distant camel-bells, a thin, far quiver of sound, had now reached his ears and those of the other men, less sensitive than the woman’s.

Over the edge of the wady he peered, across a wa’ar, or stony ground covered with mummified scrub.  Beyond, a blanched salt-plain gleamed hoar-white in the on-coming dusk; and farther off, the dunes began again.

Strangely enough, the Master laughed.  He turned and beckoned, silently.  The others joined him.

“From the west!” he whispered.  “This is no pursuit!  It is a caravan going to Jannati Shahr!”

Bohannan chuckled, and patted his revolver.

“Faith, but Allah is being good to us!” he muttered.  “Now, when it comes to a fight—­”

“Ten dromedaries—­no, nine—­” Leclair judged.

“And six camel-drivers,” put in the woman, gun in hand.  “A small caravan!”

“Hold your fire, all!” commanded the Master.  “They’re headed right across this wady.  Wait till I give the word; then rush them!  And—­no prisoners!”

CHAPTER L

“WHERE THERE IS NONE BUT ALLAH”

An hour after sundown, four Legionaries pushed westward, driving the gaunt, mange-stained camels.  In the sand near the wady lay buried Leclair and all the camel-drivers, with the sand smoothed over them so as to leave as little trace as possible.

Leclair had come to the death of all deaths he would have most abominated, death by ruse at the hands of an Arab.  Not all his long experience with Arabs had prevented him from bending over a dead camel-driver.  The dead man had suddenly revived from his feigned death and driven a jambiyeh into the base of the lieutenant’s throat.  That the lieutenant’s orderly had instantly shattered the cameleer’s skull with a point-blank shot had not saved Leclair.