ater of strongly mordant qualities.

Each figure bore, on its bent back, a goat-skin bag as heavily filled
with water as could be carried. Strongly alkaline as that water was,
corroding to the mouth and nauseous to the taste, still the refugees
were clinging to it. For only this now stood between them and one
of the most hideous deaths known to man--the death of thirst in the
wilderness.

The woman's face, in spite of pain, anxiety, weariness, retained
its beauty. Her heavy masses of hair, bound up with cloth strips,
protected her head from "the great enemy," the sun. As for the others,
they had improvised rough headgear from their torn shirts, ingeniously
tied into some semblance of _cherchias_. Above all, the Legionaries
knew that they must guard their heads from the direct rays of the
desert sun.

In silence, all plodded on, on, toward the bleeding sphere that, now
oblate through flaming mists, was mercifully sinking to rest. No look
of surprise marked the face of any man, that "Captain Alden" was in
reality a woman. The Legionaries' anguish, the numbing, brutalizing
effects of their recent experience had been too great for any minor
emotions to endure. They had accepted this fact like all others, as
one of a series of incredible things that had, none the less, been
true.

For a certain time the remnant of the Legion dragged itself
south-westward, panting, gasping, wasting no breath in speech. Leclair
was first to utter words.

"Let us rest a little while, _mon capitaine_," said he in a hoarse,
choking voice. "Rest, and drink again. I know the desert. Many
hundreds of miles lie between us and the coast. Nothing can be gained
by hastening, at first. All may be lost. Let us rest, at all events,
until that cursed sun has set!"

In silence the Master cast down his water-bag, at the bottom of the
little, desolate valley of gravel through which the fugitives were now
toiling. All did the same, and all sat down--or rather, fell--upon the
hot earth.

Very different, now, this land was from what it had seemed as they
had soared above it, at cool altitudes, in the giant air-liner; very
different from the cool, green plain of El Barr, behind the grim black
line of the Iron Mountains now a dim line off to eastward.

The sprawling collapse of the Legionaries told more eloquently than
any words the exhaustion that already, after only four hours' trek,
was strangling the life out of them.

For a while they lay there mo