Their heated fancies had pictured this treasure of the great Djied as something beyond all that her sex had ever given them, and to snare her in some unwary moment was the chief thought of Zephyr and Spahi when they went out on a scouting or foraging party.  But it was easier said than done; the eyes of no Frank ever fell on her, and when he was most closely driven the Khalifa Ilderim abandoned his cattle and sheep, but, with the females of the tribe still safely guarded, fell more and more backward and southward; drawing the French on and on, farther and farther across the plains, in the sickliest times of hottest drought.

Re-enforcements could swell the Imperial ranks as swiftly as they were thinned, but with the Arabs a man once fallen was a man the less to their numbers forever, and the lightning-like pursuit began to tell terribly on them; their herds had fallen into their pursuers’ hands, and famine menaced them.  Nevertheless, they were fierce in attack as tigers, rapid in swoop as vultures, and fought flying in such fashion that the cavalry lost more in this fruitless, worthless work than they would have done in a second Hohenlinden or Austerlitz.

Moreover, the heat was intense, water was bad and very rare, dysentery came with the scorch and the toil of this endless charge; the chief in command, M. le Marquis de Chateauroy, swore heavily as he saw many of his best men dropping off like sheep in a murrain, and he offered two hundred napoleons to whosoever should bring either the dead Sheik’s head or the living beauty of Djelma.

One day the Chasseurs had pitched their camp where a few barren, withered trees gave a semblance of shelter, and a little thread of brackish water oozed through the yellow earth.

It was high noon; the African sun was at its fiercest; far as the eye could reach there was only one boundless, burning, unendurable glitter of parching sand and cloudless sky—­brazen beneath, brazen above—­till the desert and the heavens touched, and blent in one tawny, fiery glow in the measureless distance.  The men lay under canvas, dead-beat, half-naked, without the power to do anything except to fight like thirst-maddened dogs for a draught at the shallow stream that they and their breathless horses soon drained dry.

Even Raoul de Chateauroy, though his frame was like an Arab’s, and knit into Arab endurance, was stretched like a great bloodhound, chained by the sultry oppression.  He was ruthless, inflexible, a tyrant to the core, and sharp and swift as steel in his rigor, but he was a fine soldier, and never spared himself any of the hardships that his regiment had to endure under him.

Suddenly the noon lethargy of the camp was broken; a trumpet-call rang through the stillness; against the amber transparency of the horizon line the outlines of half a dozen horsemen were seen looming nearer and nearer with every moment; they were some Spahis who had been out sweeping the country for food.  The mighty frame of Chateauroy, almost as unclothed as an athlete’s, started from its slumberous, panting rest; his eyes lightened hungrily; he muttered a fiery oath; “Mort de Dieu!—­they have the woman!”