“It’s this confounded light,” he cried, and his cheeks flushed with annoyance.  “Think of my wasting three cartridges in that fashion!  If I had him at Bisley I’d shoot the turban off him, but this vibrating glare means refraction.  What’s the matter with the Frenchman?”

Monsieur Fardet was stamping about the plateau with the gestures of a man who has been stung by a wasp. “S’cre nom!  S’cre nom!” he shouted, showing his strong white teeth under his black waxed moustache.  He wrung his right hand violently, and as he did so he sent a little spray of blood from his finger-tips.  A bullet had chipped his wrist.  Headingly ran out from the cover where be had been crouching, with the intention of dragging the demented Frenchman into a place of safety, but he had not taken three paces before he was himself hit in the loins, and fell with a dreadful crash among the stones.  He staggered to his feet, and then fell again in the same place, floundering up and down like a horse which has broken its back.  “I’m done!” he whispered, as the Colonel ran to his aid, and then he lay still, with his china-white cheek against the black stones.  When, but a year before, he had wandered under the elms of Cambridge, surely the last fate upon this earth which he could have predicted for himself would be that he should be slain by the bullet of a fanatical Mohammedan in the wilds of the Libyan Desert.

Meanwhile the fire of the escort had ceased, for they had shot away their last cartridge.  A second man had been killed, and a third—­who was the corporal in charge—­had received a bullet in his thigh.  He sat upon a stone, tying up his injury with a grave, preoccupied look upon his wrinkled black face, like an old woman piecing together a broken plate.  The three others fastened their bayonets with a determined metallic rasp and snap, and the air of men who intended to sell their lives dearly.

“They’re coming!” cried Belmont, looking over the plain.

“Let them come!” the Colonel answered, putting his hands into his trouser-pockets.  Suddenly he pulled one fist out, and shook it furiously in the air.  “Oh, the cads! the confounded cads!” he shouted, and his eyes were congested with rage.

It was the fate of the poor donkey-boys which had carried the self-contained soldier out of his usual calm.  During the firing they had remained huddled, a pitiable group, among the rocks at the base of the hill.  Now upon the conviction that the charge of the Dervishes must come first upon them, they had sprung upon their animals with shrill, inarticulate cries of fear, and had galloped off across the plain.  A small flanking-party of eight or ten camel-men had worked round while the firing had been going on, and these dashed in among the flying donkey-boys, hacking and hewing with a cold-blooded, deliberate ferocity.  One little boy, in a flapping Galabeeah, kept ahead of his pursuers for a time, but the long stride of the camels ran him down, and an Arab thrust his spear into the middle of his stooping back.  The small, white-clad corpses looked like a flock of sheep trailing over the desert.