r sank face downward, a moment, then with only one
arm, continued to ply for land, leaving a crimson trail behind.

None of the untouched Legionaries took any heed of this, or stopped
their furious swimming to see what damage had been done or to offer
help. Life was at stake. Every second in the breakers was big with
death. This was stern work, to be put through with speed. But the
faces of the swimming men grew hard to look upon.

The Master and Leclair were first to touch foot to the shelving
bottom, all churned up by the long cavalry-charges of the sea-horses,
and to drag themselves out of the smother. Rrisa and Bohannan
came next, then Enemark, and then the others--all save Beziers and
Daimamoto, French ace and Japanese surgeon, whose work was forever
at an end. Enemark, engineer and scientist, shot through the left
shoulder, was dragged ashore, strangling, by eager hands.

"Down! Down!" shouted the Master. "Dig in!"

Right well he knew the futility, the suicidal folly of trying to
charge some three hundred entrenched men with a handful of panting,
exhausted soldiers armed only with revolvers.

"Take cover!" his cry rang along the beach. They obeyed. Under a
galling fire that flung stinging sand into their faces and that took
toll of two more Legionaries, wounded, the expedition dug for its very
life.

The best of strategy! The only strategy, the Master knew, as--panting
a little, with thick, black hair glued by sea-water to his head--he
flattened himself into a little depression in the sand, where the
first ripple of the dunes began.

Hot was the sand, and dry. Withered camel-grass grew in dejected tufts
here, there, interspersed with a few straggles of half a. A jackal's
skull, bleached, lay close to the Master's right hand. Its polish
attested the care of others of its kind, of hyenas, and of vultures.
Just so would a human skull appear, in no long time, if left to
nature's tender ministrations. Out of an eyehole of the skull a dusty
gray scorpion half crawled, then retreated, tail over back, venomous,
deadly.

Death lurked not alone in sea and in the rifles of the inhabitants of
this harsh land, but even in the crawling things underfoot.

The Master paid no heed to shriveled grass, to skull, or scorpion.
All his thoughts were bent on the overcoming of that band of Islamic
outcasts now persistently pot-shotting away at the strange flying
men from unknown lands "that faced not Mecca nor kept Ramadan"--m