“By God!  I have a mind to have you shot like a dog!”

The Chasseur looked at him carelessly, composedly, but with a serene deference still, as due from a soldier to his chief.

“You have threatened it before, M. le Colonel.  It may be as well to do it, or the army may think you capricious.”

Raoul de Chateauroy crushed a blasphemous oath through his clinched teeth, and laughed a certain short, stern, sardonic laugh, which his men dreaded more than his wrath.

“No; I will send you instead to the Khalifa.  He often saves me the trouble of killing my own curs.  Take a flag of truce and this paper, and never draw rein till you reach him, if your beast drop dead at the end.”

The Chasseur saluted, took the paper, bowed with a certain languid, easy grace that camp life never cured him of, and went.  He knew that the man who should take the news of his treasure’s loss to the Emir Ilderim would, a thousand to one, perish by every torture desert cruelty could frame, despite the cover of the white banner.

Chateauroy looked after him, as he and his horse passed from the French camp in the full burning tide of noon.

“If the Arabs kill him,” he thought, “I will forgive Ilderim five seasons of rebellion.”

The Chasseur, as he had been bidden, never drew rein across the scorching plateau.  He rode to what he knew was like enough to be death, and death by many a torment, as though he rode to a midnight love-tryst.  His horse was of Arab breed—­young, fleet, and able to endure extraordinary pressure, both of spur and of heat.  He swept on, far and fast, through the sickly, lurid glitter of the day, over the loose sand, that flew in puffs around him as the hoofs struck it flying right and left.  At last, ere he reached the Bedouin tents, that were still but slender black points against the horizon, he saw the Sheik and a party of horsemen returning from a foraging quest, and in ignorance as yet of the abduction of Djelma.  He galloped straight to them, and halted across their line of march, with the folds of the little white flag fluttering in the sun.  The Bedouins drew bridle, and Ilderim advanced alone.  He was a magnificent man, of middle age, with the noblest type of the eagle-eyed, aquiline desert beauty.  He was a superb specimen of his race, without the lean, withered, rapacious, vulture look which often mars it.  His white haik floated round limbs fit for a Colossus:  and under the snowy folds of his turban the olive-bronze of his bold forehead, the sweep of his jet-black beard, and the piercing luminance of his eyes had a grand and kingly majesty.

A glance of recognition from him on the lascar, who had so often crossed swords with him; and he waved back the scroll with dignified courtesy.

“Read it me.”

It was read.  Bitterly, blackly shameful, the few brutal words were.  They netted him as an eagle is netted in a shepherd’s trap.