“Gale!” I implored; and I tried to stroke her.

She bit my hand and then leapt into the grave and began to dig, throwing the sand furiously aside.

I tried three times to chase her away.  I felt that I should never finish my task and that, even if I did, Gale would stay there and disinter the body.

My carbine lay at my feet.  A shot drew echoes from the immense empty desert.  A moment later, Gale also slept her last sleep, curled up, as I so often had seen her, against the neck of her mistress.

When the surface showed nothing more than a little mound of trampled sand, I rose staggering and started off aimlessly into the desert, toward the south.

XX

THE CIRCLE IS COMPLETE

At the foot of the valley of the Mia, at the place where the jackal had cried the night Saint-Avit told me he had killed Morhange, another jackal, or perhaps the same one, howled again.

Immediately I had a feeling that this night would see the irremediable fulfilled.

We were seated that evening, as before, on the poor veranda improvised outside our dining-room.  The floor was of plaster, the balustrade of twisted branches; four posts supported a thatched roof.

I have already said that from the veranda one could look far out over the desert.  As he finished speaking, Saint-Avit rose and stood leaning his elbows on the railing.  I followed him.

“And then....”  I said.

He looked at me.

“And then what?  Surely you know what all the newspapers told—­how, in the country of the Awellimiden, I was found dying of hunger and thirst by an expedition under the command of Captain Aymard, and taken to Timbuctoo.  I was delirious for a month afterward.  I have never known what I may have said during those spells of burning fever.  You may be sure the officers of the Timbuctoo Club did not feel it incumbent upon them to tell me.  When I told them of my adventures, as they are related in the report of the Morhange—­Saint-Avit Expedition, I could see well enough from the cold politeness with which they received my explanations, that the official version which I gave them differed at certain points from the fragments which had escaped me in my delirium.

“They did not press the matter.  It remains understood that Captain Morhange died from a sunstroke and that I buried him on the border of the Tarhit watercourse, three marches from Timissao.  Everybody can detect that there are things missing in my story.  Doubtless they guess at some mysterious drama.  But proofs are another matter.  Because of the impossibility of collecting them, they prefer to smother what could only become a silly scandal.  But now you know all the details as well as I.”

“And—­she?” I asked timidly.

He smiled triumphantly.  It was triumph at having led me to think no longer of Morhange, or of his crime, the triumph of feeling that he had succeeded in imbuing me with his own madness.