Slowly the French ace swept the glasses along the surf-foamed fringes of that desolation.  Across the lenses no tree flung its green promise of shade.  No house, no hut was visible.  Not even a patch of grass could be discerned.  The African coast lay stretched out in ivory nakedness, clean, bare, swept and garnished by simooms, by cruel heat, by the beatings of surf eternal.

Back of it extended an iron hinterland, savage with desert spaces of sun-baked, wrinkled earth and sand here and there leprously mottled with white patches of salt and with what the Arabs call sabkhah, or sheets of gypsum.  The setting sun painted all this horror of desolation with strange rose and orange hues, with umbers and pale purples that for a moment reminded the Master of the sunset he had witnessed from the windows of Niss’rosh, the night his great plan had come to him.  Only eight days ago, that night had been; it seemed eight years!

Carefully Leclair observed this savage landscape, over which a brilliant sky, of luminous indigo and lilac, was bending to the vague edge of the world.  Serious though the situation was, the Frenchman could not repress a thought of the untamed beauty of that scene—­a land long familiar to him, in the days when he had flown down these coasts on punitive expeditions against the rebellious Beni Harb clans of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents.  Africa, once more seen under such unexpected circumstances, roused his blood as he peered at the crude intensity of it, the splendid blaze of its seared nakedness under the blood-red sun-ball now dropping to rest.

All at once his glass stopped its sweep.

“Smoke, my Captain!” he exclaimed.  “See, it curls aloft like a lady’s ringlet.  And—­beyond the wady—­”

“Ah, you see them, too?”

The major’s glass, held unsteadily in his unbandaged hand, was now fixed on the indicated spot, as was “Captain Alden’s.”

“I see them,” the Master answered.  “And the green flag—­the flag of the Prophet—­”

“The flag, oui, mon capitaine! There are many men, but—­”

“But what, Lieutenant?”

“Ah, do you not see?  No horses.  No camels.  That means their oasis is not far.  That means they are not traveling.  This is no nomadic moving of the Ahl Bayt.  No, no, my Captain.  It is—­”

“Well, what?”

“A war-party.  What you in your language call the—­the reception committee, n’est-ce pas? Ah, yes, the reception committee.”

“And the guests?” demanded the major.

“The guests are all the members of the Flying Legion!” answered the Frenchman, with another draw at his indispensable cigarette.

CHAPTER XX

THE WAITING MENACE

“Ah, sure now, but that’s fine!” exclaimed the major with delight, his eyes beginning to sparkle in anticipation.  “The best of news!  A little action, eh?  I ask nothing better.  All I ask is that we live to reach the committee—­live to be properly killed!  It’s this dying-alive that kills me!  Faith, it tears the nerves clean out of my body!”