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 passion. 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 facin