If he struck not, and struck not surely, he saw that a few moments more of that moonlight night were all that he would live.  He wished to avoid bloodshed, both because his sympathies were always with the conquered tribes, and because he knew that every one of these quarrels and combats between the vanquisher and the vanquished served further to widen the breach, already broad enough, between them.  But it was no longer a matter of choice with him, as his shoulder was grazed by a thrust which, but for a swerve of his horse, would have pierced to his lungs; and the four riders, yelling like madmen, forced the animal back on his haunches, and assaulted him with breathless violence.  He swept his own arm back, and brought his saber down straight through the sword-arm of the foremost; the limb was cleft through as if the stroke of an ax had severed it, and, thrice infuriated, the Arabs closed in on him.  The points of their weapons were piercing his harness when, sharp and swift, one on another, three shots hissed past him; the nearest of his assailants fell stone dead, and the others, wounded and startled, loosed their hold, shook their reins, and tore off down the lonely road, while the dead man’s horse, shaking his burden from him out of the stirrups, followed them at a headlong gallop through a cloud of dust.

“That was a pretty cut through the arm; better had it been through the throat.  Never do things by halves, ami Victor,” said Cigarette carelessly, as she thrust her pistols back into her sash, and looked, with the tranquil appreciation of a connoisseur, on the brown, brawny, naked limb, where it lay severed on the sand, with the hilt of the weapon still hanging in the sinewy fingers.  Cecil threw himself from his saddle and gazed at her in bewildered amazement; he had thought those sure, cool, death-dealing shots had come from some Spahi or Chasseur.

“I owe you my life!” he said rapidly.  “But—­good God!—­you have shot the fellow dead——­”

Cigarette shrugged her shoulders with a contemptuous glance at the Bedouin’s corpse.

“To be sure—­I am not a bungler.”

“Happily for me, or I had been where he lies now.  But wait—­let me look; there may be breath in him yet.”

Cigarette laughed, offended and scornful, as with the offense and scorn of one whose first science was impeached.

“Look and welcome; but if you find any life in that Arab, make a laugh of it before all the army to-morrow.”

She was at her fiercest.  A thousand new emotions had been roused in her that night, bringing pain with them, that she bitterly resented; and, moreover, this child of the Army of Africa caught fire at the flame of battle with instant contagion, and had seen slaughter around her from her first infancy.

Cecil, disregarding her protest, stooped and raised the fallen Bedouin.  He saw at a glance that she was right; the lean, dark, lustful face was set in the rigidity of death; the bullet had passed straight through the temples.