She had a long route before her; she had many leagues to travel, and there were but four-and-twenty hours, she knew well, left to the man who was condemned to death.  Four-and-twenty hours left open for appeal—­no more—­betwixt the delivery and execution of the sentence.  That delay was always interpreted by the French Code as a delay extending from the evening of the day to the dawn of the second day following; and some slight interval might then ensue, according as the general in command ordained.  But the twenty-four hours was all of which she could be certain; and even of them some must have flown by since the carrier-pigeon had been loosed to her.  She could not tell how long he had to live.

There were fifty miles between her and her goal; Abd-el-Kader’s horse had once covered that space in three hours, so men of the Army of D’Aumale had told her; she knew what they had done she could do.  Once only she paused, to let her horse lie a brief while, and cool his foam-flecked sides, and crop some short, sweet grass that grew where a cleft of water ran and made the bare earth green.  She sat quite motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in her eyes—­the worst hunger—­that which craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough.  Then she mounted again, and again went on, on her flight.

She swept by cantonments, villages, soldiers on the march, douairs of peaceful Arabs, strings of mules and camels, caravans of merchandise; nothing arrested her; she saw nothing that she passed, as she rode over the hard, dust-covered, shadowless roads; over the weary, sun-scorched, monotonous country; over the land without verdure and without foliage, the land that yet has so weird a beauty, so irresistible a fascination; the land to which men, knowing that death waits for them in it, yet return with as mad an infatuation as her lovers went back across the waters to Circe.

The horse was reeking with smoke and foam, and the blood was coursing from his flanks, as she reached her destination at last, and threw herself off his saddle as he sank, faint and quivering, to the ground.  Whither she had come was to a fortress where the Marshal of France, who was the Viceroy of Africa, had arrived that day in his progress of inspection throughout the provinces.  Soldiers clustered round her eagerly beneath the gates and over the fallen beast; a thousand questions pouring from their curious tongues.  She pointed to the animal with one hand, to the gaunt pile of stone that bristled with cannon with the other.

“Have a care of him; and lead me to the chief.”

She spoke quietly; but a certain sensation of awe and fear moved those who heard.  She was not the Child of the Army whom they knew so well.  She was a creature, desperate, hard-pressed, mute as death, strong as steel; above all, hunted by despair.