poor beast’s neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill, wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the cry of a shot-stricken animal.  She saw it all:  the breaking of the rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines gleaming in the first rays of the sun. . .  She had seen it so many times—­seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.

That single moment was all the soldier’s nature in her gave to the abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her.  With that one cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself; she knew that action alone could aid him.  She looked across, southward and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which she could get aid.  If there were none, the horse must drop down to die, and with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun would rise.

Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and there by fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance of some yet darker thing, moving rapidly—­a large cloud skimming the earth.  She let the horse, which had paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck, stand still a while, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud till, with the marvelous surety of her desert-trained vision, she disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering shadows and recognized it, as it was, a band of Arabs.

If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength of her horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from their pursuit, or even from their perception, for they were coming straightly and swiftly across the plain.  If she were seen by them, she was certain of her fate; they could only be the desperate remnant of the decimated tribes, the foraging raiders of starving and desperate men, hunted from refuge to refuge, and carrying fire and sword in their vengeance wherever an unprotected caravan or a defenseless settlement gave them the power of plunder and of slaughter, that spared neither age nor sex.  She was known throughout the length and the breadth of the land to the Arabs; she was neither child nor woman to them; she was but the soldier who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe who had seen them defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their pursuit in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful days.  Some among them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful death if ever they made her captive, for they held her in superstitious awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish successes would be broken if she were slain.  She knew that; yet, knowing it, she looked at their advancing band one moment, then turned her horse’s head and rode straight toward them.

“They will kill me, but that may save him,” she thought.  “Any other way he is lost.”