bed, practically blew the head off
one of these door-keepers.

Cracowicz got the other with a blow from the butt of his empty
pistol--a blow that crushed in the right temporal bone. Then he, too,
and three others, fell and died.

Outside, in the passage, the Maghrabis were wringing the necks of the
wounded white men. The dull sound of crushed and broken bones blent
with the turmoil.

"_The door--shut the door!_"

The Master's voice penetrated even this Hell-tumult. The Master flung
himself against the door, and others with him.

The very frenzy of the attack defeated the Arab's object, for it drove
the survivors back into the treasure-crypt. And in the narrow doorway
the white men could for a moment hold back the howling tides of fury.

With cold lead, butts, naked fists, the remaining Legionaries smashed
a little clearance-room, corpse-heaped. They stumbled, fought, fell
into the crypt.

The heavy door, swung by panting, sweating men--while others fired
through the narrowing aperture--groaned shut on massive hinges.

As the space narrowed, frenzy broke loose. Arabs and Maghrabis crawled
and struggled over bodies, flung themselves to sure immolation in the
doorway. As fast as they fell, the Legionaries dragged them inside.
The place became an infernal shambles, slippery, crimson, unreal with
horror.

For one fate-heavy moment, the tides of war hung even. Furiously the
remaining Legionaries toiled with straining muscles, swelling veins,
panting lungs, to force the door shut, against the shrieking, frenzied
drive of Moslem fanatics lashed into fury by the _thar_, the feud of
blood.

"Captain Alden" turned the tide. She snatched down one of the copper
lamps that hung by chains from the dim ceiling of the treasure-crypt.
Over the heads of the Legionaries she flung blazing sandal-oil out
upon the white-robed jam of madmen.

The flaming oil flared up along those thin, white robes. It dripped on
wounded and on dead. Wild howls of anguish pierced the tumult. In the
minute of confusion, the door boomed shut. Bohannan dropped a heavy
teakwood bar into staples of bronze.

"God!" he panted, his right eye misted with blood from a jagged cut
on the brow. Shrieks of rage, from without, were answered by jeers and
shouts of exultation from the Legionaries.

"_Nom de Dieu!_" gasped Leclair. His neck was blackened with a
powder burn, and the tunic was ripped clean off him. Not one of the
Legionaries had uniforms complete