mplaint.

It was all for "Captain Alden" that the Master's anxiety was now
awakened. Here was a woman, not only exposed to risks of death, but
also of capture by Orientals--and what it might mean to a white woman
to be seized for some hidden harem in Jannati Shahr the Master knew
only too well. He found a moment's pause to speak in a low tone to the
"captain," unheard by any of the others.

"Remember the mercy-bullet!" said he. "If anything happens and there's
any risk of capture--remember, the last one for yourself!"

"If the worst comes," she whispered, "we can at least share death
together!"

He gazed at her a moment, not quite fathoming her words, but with an
inexplicable tightening round the heart.

"We can at least share death together!"

Why should those words so powerfully affect him? What were these
uncomprehended, new emotions stirring in his hard soul, tempered by
war and by unnumbered stern adventurings?

The Master had no skill in self-analysis, to tell him. Leader of
others, himself he did not understand. But as that night aboard Nissr,
when he had laid a hand on the woman's cabin door, something unknown
to him seemed drawing him to her, making her welfare and her life
assume a strange import.

"Come, O Frank!" Bara Miyan was saying. The Olema's words recalled the
Master to himself with a start. "Such food and drink as we men of El
Barr have, gladly we share with thee and thine!"

The old man entered the dark doorway of the citadel, noiselessly in
soft sandals. Beside him walked the Master; and, well grouped and
flanked and followed by the Arabs in their white robes--all silent,
grave, watchful--the Legion also entered.

Behind them once more closed the massive doors, silently.

The eighteen Legionaries were pent in solid walls of metal, there in
the heart of a vast city of fighting-men whose god was Allah and to
whom all unbelievers were as outcasts and as pariah dogs--anathema.

CHAPTER XLI

THE MASTER'S PRICE

A dim and subtly perfumed corridor opened out before them, its walls
hung with tapestries, between which, by the light of sandal-oil
_mash'als_, or cressets, the glimmer of the dull-gold walls could be
distinguished.

Pillars rose to the roof, and these were all inlaid with
mother-of-pearl, with fine copper and silver arabesques of amazing
complexity. Every minutest architectural detail had been carved out of
the solid gold dyke that had formed the city; nothing had bee