a hand-glass over the
river-pebbles; this was the watering-place of the wild animals.

On the other slope the whitish trail was dimly to be discerned which
their heavy paws had traced in the brush--a mysterious path which made
one's flesh creep. Join to this sensation that from the vague swarming
sound in African forests, the swishing of branches, the velvety-pads of
roving creatures, the jackal's shrill yelp, and up in the sky, two or
three hundred feet aloft, vast flocks of cranes passing on with screams
like poor little children having their weasands slit. You will own that
there were grounds for a man being moved.

Tartarin was so, and even more than that, for the poor fellow's teeth
chattered, and on the cross-bar of his hunting-knife, planted upright
in the bank, as we repeat, his rifle-barrel rattled like a pair of
castanets. Do not ask too much of a man! There are times when one is
not in the mood; and, moreover, where would be the merit if heroes were
never afraid?

Well, yes, Tartarin was afraid, and all the time, too, for the matter
of that. Nevertheless, he held out for an hour; better, for two; but
heroism has its limits. Nigh him, in the dry part of the rivulet-bed,
the Tarasconian unexpectedly heard the sound of steps and of pebbles
rolling. This time terror lifted him off the ground. He banged away both
barrels at haphazard into the night, and retreated as fast as his
legs would carry him to the marabout's chapel-vault, leaving his knife
standing up in the sand like a cross commemorative of the grandest panic
that ever assailed the soul of a conqueror of hydras.

"Help! this Way, prince; the lion is on me!"

There was silence. "Prince, prince, are you there?"

The prince was not there. On the white moonlit wall of the fane the
camel alone cast the queer-shaped shadow of his protuberance. Prince
Gregory had cut and run with the wallet of bank-notes. His Highness had
been for the month past awaiting this opportunity.

VI. Bagged him at Last.

IT was not until early on the morrow of this adventurous and dramatic
eve that our hero awoke, and acquired assurance doubly sure that the
prince and the treasure had really gone off, without any prospect
of return. When he saw himself alone in the little white tombhouse,
betrayed, robbed, abandoned in the heart of savage Algeria, with a
one-humped camel and some pocket-money as all his resources, then did
the representative of Tarascon for the first ti