piecing together a broken
plate. The three others fastened their bayonets with a determined
metallic rasp and snap, and the air of men who intended to sell their
lives dearly.

"They're coming!" cried Belmont, looking over the plain.

"Let them come!" the Colonel answered, putting his hands into his
trouser-pockets. Suddenly he pulled one fist out, and shook it
furiously in the air. "Oh, the cads! the confounded cads!" he shouted,
and his eyes were congested with rage.

It was the fate of the poor donkey-boys which had carried the
self-contained soldier out of his usual calm. During the firing they
had remained huddled, a pitiable group, among the rocks at the base of
the hill. Now upon the conviction that the charge of the Dervishes must
come first upon them, they had sprung upon their animals with shrill,
inarticulate cries of fear, and had galloped off across the plain.
A small flanking-party of eight or ten camel-men had worked round while
the firing had been going on, and these dashed in among the flying
donkey-boys, hacking and hewing with a cold-blooded, deliberate
ferocity. One little boy, in a flapping Galabeeah, kept ahead of his
pursuers for a time, but the long stride of the camels ran him down, and
an Arab thrust his spear into the middle of his stooping back. The
small, white-clad corpses looked like a flock of sheep trailing over the
desert.

But the people upon the rock had no time to think of the cruel fate of
the donkey-boys. Even the Colonel, after that first indignant outburst,
had forgotten all about them. The advancing camel-men had trotted to
the bottom of the hill, had dismounted, and leaving their camels
kneeling, had rushed furiously onward. Fifty of them were clambering up
the path and over the rocks together, their red turbans appearing and
vanishing again as they scrambled over the boulders. Without a shot or
a pause they surged over the three black soldiers, killing one and
stamping the other two down under their hurrying feet. So they burst on
to the plateau at the top, where an unexpected resistance checked them
for an instant.

The travellers, nestling up against one another, had awaited, each after
his own fashion, the coming of the Arabs. The Colonel, with his hands
back in his trouser-pockets, tried to whistle out of his dry lips.
Belmont folded his arms and leaned against a rock, with a sulky frown
upon his lowering face. So strangely do our minds act that his th