The matter of the oxen’s pace made pursuit impossible to avoid.  Shard therefore countermanded his order to his lieutenant to cover the tracks in the sand, and the Desperate Lark plodded on into the Sahara on her new course trusting to her guns.

The village was not a large one and the little crowd that was sighted astern next morning disappeared after the first shot from the cannon in the stern.  At first Shard made the oxen wear rough iron bits, another of his mistakes, and strong bits too.  “For if they run away,” he had said, “we might as well be driving before a gale and there’s no saying where we’d find ourselves,” but after a day or two he found that the bits were no good and, like the practical man he was, immediately corrected his mistake.

And now the crew sang merry songs all day bringing out mandolins and clarionets and cheering Captain Shard.  All were jolly except the captain himself whose face was moody and perplexed; he alone expected to hear more of those villagers; and the oxen were drinking up the water every day, he alone feared that there was no more to be had, and a very unpleasant fear that is when your ship is becalmed in a desert.  For over a week they went on like this doing ten knots a day and the music and singing got on the captain’s nerves, but he dared not tell his men what the trouble was.  And then one day the oxen drank up the last of the water.  And Lieutenant Smerdrak came and reported the fact.

“Give them rum,” said Shard, and he cursed the oxen.  “What is good enough for me,” he said, “should be good enough for them,” and he swore that they should have rum.

“Aye, aye, sir,” said the young lieutenant of pirates.

Shard should not be judged by the orders he gave that day, for nearly a fortnight he had watched the doom that was coming slowly towards him, discipline cut him off from anyone that might have shared his fear and discussed it, and all the while he had had to navigate his ship, which even at sea is an arduous responsibility.  These things had fretted the calm of that clear judgment that had once baffled five navies.  Therefore he cursed the oxen and ordered them rum, and Smerdrak had said “Aye, aye, sir,” and gone below.

Towards sunset Shard was standing on the poop, thinking of death; it would not come to him by thirst; mutiny first, he thought.  The oxen were refusing rum for the last time, and the men were beginning to eye Captain Shard in a very ominous way, not muttering, but each man looking at him with a sidelong look of the eye as though there were only one thought among them all that had no need of words.  A score of geese like a long letter “V” were crossing the evening sky, they slanted their necks and all went twisting downwards somewhere about the horizon.  Captain Shard rushed to his chart-room, and presently the men came in at the door with Old Frank in front looking awkward and twisting his cap in his hand.