“Down!  Down!” shouted the Master.  “Dig in!”

Right well he knew the futility, the suicidal folly of trying to charge some three hundred entrenched men with a handful of panting, exhausted soldiers armed only with revolvers.

“Take cover!” his cry rang along the beach.  They obeyed.  Under a galling fire that flung stinging sand into their faces and that took toll of two more Legionaries, wounded, the expedition dug for its very life.

The best of strategy!  The only strategy, the Master knew, as—­panting a little, with thick, black hair glued by sea-water to his head—­he flattened himself into a little depression in the sand, where the first ripple of the dunes began.

Hot was the sand, and dry.  Withered camel-grass grew in dejected tufts here, there, interspersed with a few straggles of half a.  A jackal’s skull, bleached, lay close to the Master’s right hand.  Its polish attested the care of others of its kind, of hyenas, and of vultures.  Just so would a human skull appear, in no long time, if left to nature’s tender ministrations.  Out of an eyehole of the skull a dusty gray scorpion half crawled, then retreated, tail over back, venomous, deadly.

Death lurked not alone in sea and in the rifles of the inhabitants of this harsh land, but even in the crawling things underfoot.

The Master paid no heed to shriveled grass, to skull, or scorpion.  All his thoughts were bent on the overcoming of that band of Islamic outcasts now persistently pot-shotting away at the strange flying men from unknown lands “that faced not Mecca nor kept Ramadan”—­men already hidden in swiftly scooped depressions, from which the sand still kept flying up.

“Steady, men!” the Master called.  “Get your wind!  Ready with the lethal guns!  Each gun, one capsule.  Then we’ll charge them!  And—­no quarter!”

Again, silence from the Legion.  The fire from the dunes slackened.  These tactics seemed to have disconcerted the Beni Harb.  They had expected a wild, only half-organized rush up the sands, easily to be wiped out by a volley or two from the terribly accurate, long-barreled rifles.  But this restraint, this business-like entrenching reminded them only too forcibly of encounters with other men of the Franks—­the white-clad Spanish infantry from Rio de Oro, the dreaded piou-pious, zouaves, and Legion Etrangere of the French.

Firing ceased, from the Beni Harb.  Silence settled on both sides.  From the sea, the noise of waves breaking along the lower works of Nissr mingled with the hiss and refluent slither of the tumbling surf on the gleaming beach.  For a while peace seemed to have descended.

A purple shade settled over the desert.  The sun was nearly gone, now, and dusk would not be long in closing its chalice down over the light-wearied world.  Leclair, entrenched beside the Master, whispered: 

“They do not understand, these dog-brothers—­may Allah make their faces cold!” He grinned, frankly, with sparkling eyes and white teeth.  “Already we have their beards in our hands!”