ANGELS OF DEATH
In utter silence, moving only a foot at a time, the trio of
man-hunters advanced. They spaced themselves out, dragged themselves
forward one at a time, took advantage of every slightest depression,
every wrinkle in the sandy desert-floor, every mummy-like acacia and
withered tamarisk-bush, some sparse growth of which began to mingle
with the halfa-grass as they passed from the coast-dunes to the desert
itself.
Breathing only through open mouths, for greater stillness, taking care
to crackle no twig nor even slide loose sand, they labored on, under
the pale-hazed starlight. Their goal was vague. Just where they
should come upon the Beni Harb, in that confused jumble of dunes and
_nullahs_ (ravines) they could not tell; nor yet did they know the
exact distance separating the Legion's trenches from the enemy. All
was vague mystery--a mystery ready at any second, at any slightest
alarm, to blaze out death upon them.
None the less, stout-hearted and firm of purpose, they serpented their
painful way prone on the hot, dusty bosom of the Sahara. Fate for them
and for all the Legion, lay on so slight a thing as the stirring of
a twig, the _tunk_ of a boot against a bleached camel's skull, the
possibility of a sneeze or cough.
Even the chance scaring-up of a hyena or a vagrant jackal might betray
them. Every breath, every heartbeat was pregnant with contingencies of
life and death.
Groveling, they slipped forward, dim, moving shadows in a world of
brown obscurity. At any moment, one might lay a hand on a sleeping
puff-adder or a scorpion. But even that had been fore-reckoned. All
three of them had thought of such contingencies and weighed them.
Not one but had determined to suppress any possible outcry, if thus
stricken, and to die in absolute silence.
What mattered death for one, if two should win to the close range
necessary for discharging the lethal capsules? What mattered it even
for two, if one should succeed? The survivors, or the sole survivor,
would simply take the weapons from the stricken and proceed.
After what seemed more than an hour, though in fact it was but the ten
minutes agreed on with Bohannan, off behind them toward the coast a
sudden staccato popping of revolvers began to puncture the night. Up
and down the Legionaries' trench it pattered, desultory, aimless.
The three men engaged in the perilous task of what the Arabs call
_asar_, or enemy-tracking, lay prone, with bullets keening high
overhead. As the Master looked back, he could see the little spurts of
fire from that fusillade.
The firing came from more to the left than the Master had reckoned,
showing him that he had got a little off his bearings. But now he took
his course again, as he had intended to do from the Legion's fire; and
presently rifle work from the Arabs, too, verified, his direction.
The Master smiled. Leclair fingered the butt of his revolver.
Rrisa whispered curses:
"Ah, dog-sons, may you suffer the extreme cold of El Zamharir! Ah, may
_Rih al Asfar_, the yellow wind (cholera), carry you all away!"
The racket of aimless firing continued a few minutes, underneath the
mild effulgence of the stars. It ceased, from the Legion's trenches at
the agreed moment; and soon it died down, also from the Arabs'. Quiet
rose again from the desert, broken only by the surf-wash on the
sand, the far, tremulous wail of a jackal, the little dry skitter of
scorpions.
The three scouts lay quiet for ten minutes after the volleying had
ceased. Silence settled over the plain; but, presently, a low moaning
sound came indistinctly from the east. It lasted only a moment, then
died away; and almost at once, the slight wind that had been blowing
from the sea hushed itself to a strange calm.
Rrisa gave anxious ear. His face grew tense, but he held his peace.
Neither of the white men paid any heed to the slight phenomenon. To
them it meant nothing. For all their experience with the desert, they
had never happened to hear just that thing. The Arab, however, felt a
stab of profound anxiety. His lips moved in a silent prayer to Allah.
Once more the Master raised his hand in signal of advance. The three
man-stalkers wormed forward again. They now had their direction,
also their distance, with extreme precision; a simple process of
triangulation, in which the glow of the beach-fire had its share, gave
them the necessary data.
Undaunted, they approached the camp of the Beni Harb; though every
moment they expected to be challenged, to hear the crack of an
alarm-rifle or a cry to Allah, followed by a deadly blast of slugs.
But fortune's scale-pan dipped in their direction, and all held still.
The sun-baked desert kept their secret. Onward they crawled, now over
sand, now over cracked mud-flakes of saline deposit where water had
dried at the bottom of a _ghadir_. All was calm as if the spirit of
rest were hovering over the hot, fevered earth, still quivering from
the kiss of its great enemy, the sun.
"Peace, it is peace until the rising of the morn!" a thought came to
the Master's mind, a line from the chapter Al Kadr, in the Koran. He
smiled to himself. "False peace," he reflected. "The calm before the
storm!" Prophetic thought, though not as he intended it!
On and on the trio labored, soundlessly. At last the chief stopped,
held up his hand a second, lay still. The others glimpsed him by the
starlight, nested down in a shallow depression of the sand. They crept
close to him.
"Lieutenant," he whispered, "you bombard the left-hand sector, toward
the fire and the sea. Rrisa, take the right-hand one. The middle is
for me. Fire at will!"
Out from belts and pockets came the lethal pistols. With
well-estimated elevation, the attackers sighted, each covering his
own sector. Hissing with hardly audible sighs, the weapons fired their
stange pellets, and once again as over the woods on the Englewood
Palisades--really less than twenty-four hours ago, though it seemed
a month--the little greenish vapor-wisps floated down, down, sinking
gently on the Sahara air.
This attack, they knew, must be decisive or all would be hopeless. The
last supply of capsules was now being exhausted. Everything had been
staked on one supreme effort. Quickly the attackers discharged their
weapons; then, having done all that could be done, lay prone and
waited.
Once again that hollow moaning sound drifted in across the baked
expanse of the Sahara--a strange, empty sound, unreal and ominous.
Then came a stir of sultry breeze, from the east. It strengthened;
and a fine, crepitant sliding of sand-particles became audible. Rrisa
stirred uneasily.
"Master," he whispered, "we should not delay. If the _jinnee_ of the
waste overtake us, we may be lost."
"The _jinnee_ of the waste?" the Master answered, in a low tone. "What
nonsense is this?"
"The simoom, Master--the storm of sand. We call it the work of evil
spirits!"
The Master made no reply, save to command silence.
For a time nothing happened in the Arabs' camp. Then came a little
stir, off there in the gloom. A sound of voices grew audible. The name
of Allah drifted out of the all-enveloping night, to them, and that of
his Prophet. A cry: "_Ya Abd el Kadir_--" calling on a patron saint,
died before the last word, "_Jilani_," could find utterance. Then
silence, complete and leaden, fell with uncanny suddenness.
The Master laughed, dryly. He touched Leclair's arm.
"Strong medicine for the Beni Harb, Lieutenant," said he. "Their own
_imams_ (priests) have strong medicine, too, but not so strong as that
of the cursed sons of Feringistan. Sleep already lies heavy on the
eyelids of these sons of Allah. And a deeper sleep shall soon overcome
them. Tell me, Lieutenant, can you kill men wholesale?"
"Yes, my Captain."
"Sleeping men, who cannot resist you? Can you kill them
scientifically, in masses, without anger?"
"How do you know now, my Captain, that it will not be in anger?"
And the Frenchman half eased himself up on hands and knees, peering
forward into the night. "After what these Beni Harb--or their close
kin--have done to me and to poor Lebon--listen! What was that?"
"What do you mean?"
"That far, roaring noise?"
"It is nothing! A little wind, maybe; but it is nothing, nothing!
Come, I am ready for the work!"
The Master stood up. Rrisa followed suit. No longer crawling, but
walking erect, they advanced. They still used caution, careful to make
no noise; but confidence had entered into them. Were not the Arabs all
asleep?
The white men's faces were pale and drawn, with grim determination for
the task that lay ahead--the task of converting the Beni Harb's camp
into a shambles. The Arab's face, with white-rimmed eyes and with
lips drawn back from teeth, had become that of a wild animal. Rrisa's
nostrils were dilated, to scent out the enemy. He was breathing hard,
as if he had run a mile.
"They are near, now, _Ya M'almé!_" said he. "They are close at hand,
these _nakhawilah_! (pariahs). Allah, the high, the great, hath
delivered them into our hands. Verily there is no power or might but
Allah. Shall I scout ahead, Master, and spy out the camp?"
"No, Rrisa. I send no man where I will not gladly go myself. All three
of us, forward!"
Again they advanced, watchful, revolvers in hands, ready for any
sudden ambush. All at once, as they came up over a breastwork of hard
clay and gravel that heaved itself into rolling sands, the camp of the
Beni Harb became visible. Dim, brown and white figures were lying all
about, distorted in strange attitudes, on the sand beyond the ridge.
There lay the despoilers of the Haram, the robber-tribe of Sheik Abd
el Rahman, helpless in blank unconsciousness.
The Master laughed bitterly, as he strode forward into the camp, the
long lines of which stretched vaguely away toward the coast where the
fire was still leaping up against the stars, now paled with a strange
haze.
Starlight showed weapons lying all about--long rifles and primitive
flint-locks; _kanat_ spears of Indian male-bamboo tipped with steel
and decorated with tufts of black ostrich-feathers; and _jambiyehs_,
or crooked daggers, with wicked points and edges.
"Save your fire, men," said the Master picking up a spear. "There
are plenty of means, here, to give these dogs the last sleep, without
wasting good ammunition. Choose the weapon you can handle best, and
fall to work!"
With a curse on the heretic Beni Harb, and a murmur of thanks to Allah
for this wondrous hour, Rrisa caught up a short javelin, of the kind
called _mirzak_. The lieutenant chose a wide-bladed sword.
"Remember only one thing, my brothers in arms!" exclaimed the Master.
"But that is most vital!" He spoke in Arabic.
"And what may it be?" asked the Frenchman, in the same tongue.
"I do not know whether old Sheik Abd el Rahman is with this party or
not, but if either of you find him, kill him not! Deliver him to me!"
"Listen, Master!" exclaimed Rrisa, and thrust the point of his javelin
deep into the sand.
"Well, what now, Rrisa?"
"Shall we, after all, kill these sleeping swine-brothers?"
"Eh, what? Thy heart then, hath turned to water? Thou canst not kill?
They attacked us--this is justice!"
"And if they live, they will surely wipe us out!" put in the
Frenchman, staring in the gloom. "What meaneth this old woman's
babble, son of the Prophet?"
"It is not that my heart hath turned to water, nor have the fountains
of mine eyes been opened to pity," answered Rrisa. "But some things
are worse than death, to all of Arab blood. To be despoiled of arms
or of horses, without a fight, makes an Arab as the worm of the earth.
Then he becometh an outcast, indeed! 'If you would rule, disarm'," he
quoted the old proverb, and added another: "'Man unarmed in the desert
is like a bird shorn of wings.'"
"What is thy plain meaning in all this?" demanded the chief.
"Listen, _M'almé_. If you would be the Sheik of Sheiks, carry away
all these weapons, and let these swine awaken without them. They would
drag their way back to the oases and the black tents, with a story
the like of which hath never been told in the Empty Abodes. The Sahara
would do homage, Master, even as if the Prophet had returned!"
"_Lah_! I am not thinking of the Sahara. The goal lies far beyond--far
to eastward."
"Still, the folk are Arabs there, too. They would hear of this, and
bow to you, my _M'almé_!"
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I can take no chances, Rrisa. The land, here
and to the eastward, might all arise against us. The tribes might come
against us like the _rakham_, the carrion-vultures. No, we must kill
and kill, so that no man remaineth here--none save old Abd el Rahman,
if Allah deliver him into our hands!"
"That is your firm command, Master?"
"My firm command!"
"To hear the Master is to obey. But first, grant me time for my
_isha_, my evening prayer!"
"It is granted. And, Rrisa, _there_ is the _kiblah_, the direction of
Mecca!"
The Master pointed exactly east. Rrisa faced that way, knelt,
prostrated himself. He made ablution with sand, as Mohammed allows
when water cannot be found. Even as he poured it down his face, the
strangely gusting wind flicked it away in little whirls.