The Master held up the silver whistle, glinting in the last sun-glow.

They saw it, and understood. All hearts thrilled, tightening with the familiar sense of discipline. Fists gripped revolver-b.u.t.ts; feet shuffled into the sand, getting a hold for the quick, forward leap.

Keenly trilled the whistle. A shout broke from some twenty-five throats. The men leaped up, forward, slipping, staggering in the fine sand, among the bunches of dried gra.s.s. But forward they drove, and broke into a ragged, sliding charge up the breast of the dunes.

"Hold your fire, men! Hold it--then give 'em h.e.l.l!" the Master shouted. He was in the first wave of the a.s.sault. Close by came Rrisa, his brown face contracted with fanatic hate of the Beni Harb, despoilers of the Haram sanctuary.

There, too, was "Captain Alden," grim with masked face. There was Bohannan, Leclair--and pistol-barrels flickered in the evening glow, and half the men gripped knives in their left hands, as well. For this was to be a killing without quarter, to the very end.

CHAPTER XXIII

A MISSION OF DREAD

Panting, with a slither of dry sand under their laboring feet, the Legionaries charged. At any second, a raking volley might burst from the dunes. The lethal pellets--so few in this vast s.p.a.ce--might not have taken effect. Not one heart there but was steeling itself against ambush and a shriveling fire.

Up they stormed. The Master's voice cried, once more: "Give 'em h.e.l.l!"

He was the first man to top the dune, close to the wady's edge. There he checked himself, revolver in mid-air, eyes wide with astonishment.

This way and that he peered, squinting with eyes that did not understand.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Leclair, at his side.

"_Wallah_!" shouted Rrisa, furiously. "Oh, may Allah smite their faces!"

Each man, as he leaped to the rampart top, stood transfixed with astonishment. Most of them cried out in their native tongues.

Their amazement was well-grounded. Not an Arab was to be seen. Of all those Beni Harb, none remained--not even the one shot by the Master.

The sand on the dune was cupped with innumerable prints of feet in rude _babooshes_ (native shoes), and empty cartridges lay all about.

But not one of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, was visible.

"Sure, now, can you beat that?" shouted Bohannan, exultantly, and waved his service cap. "Licked at the start! They quit cold!"

Sheffield, at his side, dropped to the sand, his heart drilled by a jagged slug. The explosion of that shot crackled in from another line of dunes, off to eastward--a brown, burnt ridge, parched by the tropic sun of ages.

Sweating with the heat and the exertion of the charge, amazed at having found--in place of windrows of sleeping men--an enemy still distant and still as formidable as ever, the Legionaries for a moment remained without thought or tactics.

Rrisa, livid with fury and baffled hate, flung up wild arms and began screaming the most extravagant insults at the still invisible nomads, whose fire was now beginning again all along their line.

"O rejected ones, and sons of the rejected!" the Arab howled. "O hogs and brothers of hogs!" He fell to gnawing his own hand, as Arabs will in an excess of pa.s.sion. Once more he screamed: "O Allah, deny not their skin and bones to the eternal flame! O owls, oxen, beggars, cut-off ones! Oh, give them the burning oil, Allah! The cold faces!

Oh, wither their hands! Make them _kusah_! (beardless). Oh, these swine with black livers, gray eyes, beards of red. Vilest that ever hammered tent-pegs, goats of El Akhfash! O Beni Harb![1]"

[Footnote 1: Beni Harb, or Sons of Battle, by a change in the aspiration of the "H," becomes "Sons of Flight, or Cowardice."]

The Master gripped his furious orderly, and pushed him back, down the slope.

"No more of that, Rrisa!" he commanded, fiercely. "These be old woman's ways, these screamings! Silence, _Bismillah_!"

He hailed the others.

"They score, the first round! Their game is to retreat, if they're suspicious of any ruse or any attack from us. They're not going to stand and fight. We can't get near enough to them to throw the remaining lethal capsules over. And we can't chase them into the desert. Their plan is to hold us here, and pick us off one by one--wipe us out, without losing a man!

"Dig in again! That's our only game now. We're facing a situation that's going to tax us to the utmost, but there's only one thing to do--dig in!"

Life itself lay in digging, death in exposure to the fire of those maddeningly elusive, unseen Bedouins. Like so many dogs the Legionaries once more fell to excavating, with their knives and their bare hands, the sun-baked sand that slithered back again into their shallow trench almost as fast as they could throw it out.

A ragged fire from the Beni Harb lent speed to their efforts. Dead men and wounded could now have no attention. Life itself was all at stake.

In their rude trench they lay at last, sweating, panting, covered with sand and dust, with thirst beginning to take hold on them, and increasing swarms of flies--tiny, vicious, black things, all sting and poison--beginning to hum about them. On watch they rested there, while dull umbers of nightfall glowered through the framework of _Nissr_, tossing in the surf. Without much plan, wrecked, confronted by what seemed perils unsurmountable, the Flying Legion waited for the coming of dark to respite them from sniping.

The Master, half-way along the line with Leclair, Rrisa, the major and "Captain Alden," mentally took stock of losses thus far sustained. The wounded were: Alden, Bohannan (burned), Enemark and himself. The dead: Kloof, Sheffield, Beziers, Travers, Gorlitz, Auchincloss, Daimamoto.

Twenty-four living remained, including Leclair. The mortality, in about eighteen hours, had been twenty percent. At this rate the Master understood the Flying Legion was slated for very speedy destruction.

"It's touch-and-go now," he pondered. "We've got to annihilate these infernal Bedouins, repair the liner and get ahead, or--but there's no 'or' in this! None, at all!"

As dark settled down over the Sahara, the leprous patches of white, saline earth took on a ghostly pallor. The light of the southern stars began to glow with soft radiance. A gigantic emptiness, a rolling vacancy of sea and earth--brine-waves to rear of the Legion, sand-waves ahead--shrank the party to seeming insignificance.

A soft, purple tapestry of night unrolled across the desert; the wind died, and the suffocating breath of overheated sands began to emanate from the baked earth. And ever more and more pestiferously the infernal torment of the flies increased.

Inflamed with chagrin, rage, and grief for the lost comrades, the Legionaries lay in waiting. No conversation ran along the line.

Silence held them--and their own thoughts. Wounds had been dressed as well as they might be. Nothing remained but to await the Master's next command.

"Captain Alden's" suggestion that Kloof, still lying aboard in the liner, should be seen to, met a rebuff from the Master. Living or dead, one man could not now endanger the lives of any others. And that danger still lay in any exposure was proved by the intermittent firing from the Arab lines.

The Beni Harb were obviously determined to hold back any possibility of a charge, or any return to the protection of the giant flying-ship.

Bullets whimpered overhead, spudded into the sand, or pinged against metal on the liner. Parthian fighters though these Beni Harb were, they surely were well stocked with munitions and they meant stern business.

"And stern business is what they shall have, once the dark is complete," the Master pondered. "It is annihilation for them or for us. There can be no compromise, nor any terms but slaughter!"

One circ.u.mstance was favorable--the falling of the wind. Had it risen, kicking up a harsher surf, _Nissr_ must have begun to break. But as the cupped hand of night, closing over the earth, had also shut away the wind, the air-liner was now resting more easily. Surf still foamed about her floats and lower gallery--surf all spangled with the phosph.o.r.escence that the Arabs call "jewels of the deep"--but unless some sudden squall should fling itself against the coast, every probability favored the liner taking no further damage.

In silence, save for the occasional easing of positions along the trench, the Legionaries waited. Strange dim colors appeared along the desert horizons, half visible in the gloom--funeral palls of dim purple, with pale, ghostly reflections almost to mid-heaven.

Some of the men had tobacco and matches that had escaped being wet; and cigarettes were rolled, pa.s.sed along, lighted behind protections that would mask the match-gleam from the enemy. The comforting aroma of smoke drifted out on the desert heat. As for the Master, from time to time he slipped a khat leaf into his mouth, and remained gravely pondering.

At length his voice sounded along the trench.

"Men of the Flying Legion," said he, "this situation is grave. We can't escape on foot, north or south. We are without provisions or water. The nearest white settlement is Rio de Oro, about a hundred miles to southward; and even if we could reach that, hara.s.sed by the Beni Harb, we might all be executed there, as pirates. We must go forward or die right here on this beach.

"In any kind of a straight fight, we are hopelessly out-cla.s.sed. There are about three hundred men against twenty-four of us, some of whom are wounded. Even if we took life for life, the Bedouins would lose less than ten percent, and we'd be wiped out. And we couldn't expect to take life for life, charging a position like theirs in the night. It can't be a stand-up battle. It's got to be science against savagery, or nothing."

A murmur of approval trickled along the sands. Confidence was returning. The Legionaries' hearts tautened again with faith in this strange, this usually silent and emotionless man whose very name was unknown to almost all of them.

"Just one other word," the Master continued, his voice calm, unshaken, quite impersonal. "If science fails, do not allow yourselves to be captured. The tortures of h.e.l.l await any white man taken by these fanatics. Remember, always keep one mercy-bullet--for yourselves!"