“Dig in again!  That’s our only game now.  We’re facing a situation that’s going to tax us to the utmost, but there’s only one thing to do—­dig in!”

Life itself lay in digging, death in exposure to the fire of those maddeningly elusive, unseen Bedouins.  Like so many dogs the Legionaries once more fell to excavating, with their knives and their bare hands, the sun-baked sand that slithered back again into their shallow trench almost as fast as they could throw it out.

A ragged fire from the Beni Harb lent speed to their efforts.  Dead men and wounded could now have no attention.  Life itself was all at stake.

In their rude trench they lay at last, sweating, panting, covered with sand and dust, with thirst beginning to take hold on them, and increasing swarms of flies—­tiny, vicious, black things, all sting and poison—­beginning to hum about them.  On watch they rested there, while dull umbers of nightfall glowered through the framework of Nissr, tossing in the surf.  Without much plan, wrecked, confronted by what seemed perils unsurmountable, the Flying Legion waited for the coming of dark to respite them from sniping.

The Master, half-way along the line with Leclair, Rrisa, the major and “Captain Alden,” mentally took stock of losses thus far sustained.  The wounded were:  Alden, Bohannan (burned), Enemark and himself.  The dead:  Kloof, Sheffield, Beziers, Travers, Gorlitz, Auchincloss, Daimamoto.

Twenty-four living remained, including Leclair.  The mortality, in about eighteen hours, had been twenty percent.  At this rate the Master understood the Flying Legion was slated for very speedy destruction.

“It’s touch-and-go now,” he pondered.  “We’ve got to annihilate these infernal Bedouins, repair the liner and get ahead, or—­but there’s no ‘or’ in this!  None, at all!”

As dark settled down over the Sahara, the leprous patches of white, saline earth took on a ghostly pallor.  The light of the southern stars began to glow with soft radiance.  A gigantic emptiness, a rolling vacancy of sea and earth—­brine-waves to rear of the Legion, sand-waves ahead—­shrank the party to seeming insignificance.

A soft, purple tapestry of night unrolled across the desert; the wind died, and the suffocating breath of overheated sands began to emanate from the baked earth.  And ever more and more pestiferously the infernal torment of the flies increased.

Inflamed with chagrin, rage, and grief for the lost comrades, the Legionaries lay in waiting.  No conversation ran along the line.  Silence held them—­and their own thoughts.  Wounds had been dressed as well as they might be.  Nothing remained but to await the Master’s next command.

“Captain Alden’s” suggestion that Kloof, still lying aboard in the liner, should be seen to, met a rebuff from the Master.  Living or dead, one man could not now endanger the lives of any others.  And that danger still lay in any exposure was proved by the intermittent firing from the Arab lines.