the scant food and water of the drivers, also their
clothing, slippers, daggers, long rifles, and ammunition.

Now, dressed like Arabs--the best of all disguises in case of being
sighted by pursuers or by wandering Black Tent tribes, from far
off--they were trekking westward again, riding four of the camels and
leading the others.

For a week of Hell the failing beasts, already half dead of thirst
when captured, bore them steadily south-west, toward the coast. Twice
there rose spirals of smoke, in the desert distances; but whether
these were from El Barr pursuers or were merely Bedouin encampments
they could not tell.

Merciless goading kept the camels going till they dropped dead, one by
one.

By the end of the fourth day only three remained. Lebon methodically
cut up every one that perished, for water, but found none in any
stomach.

The fugitives sighted no oasis. They found no wady other than
stone-dry. By day they slept, by night pushed forward. Day by day
they grew weaker and less rational. The increasing nerve-strain that
possessed them was companioned by the excruciating torture of their
bodies racked by the swaying jolt of camel-riding.

But they still kept organization and coherence. Still, guided by
the stars that burned with ardent trembling in the black sky, they
followed their chosen course.

Morning heat-mist, noontide glare, wind like a beast with flaming
breath, a sky terrible in its stainless beauty, an inescapable
sun-furnace that seemed to boil the brains in their skulls--all these
and the mockery of mirages that made every long white line of salt
efflorescence a lake of cooling waters, brought the four tortured
Legionaries close to death.

Awaking toward evening of the fifth day, the Master discovered one of
the three camels gone--the one on which he had been riding with the
woman, lest she fall fainting to the sand. With this camel, Major
Bohannan had likewise disappeared. His big-shouldered, now emaciated
figure in its dirty-white burnous was nowhere visible. Only prints of
soft hoof-pads, leading off to north-eastward, betrayed the line of
flight.

The Master pondered a while as he sat there, dazed, blinking at the
desert all purple, gold, and tawny-red. His inflamed eyes, stubbly
beard and gaunt cheeks made him a caricature of the man he had been,
ten days before. After a little consideration, he awakened the woman
and Lebon.

The verdict on Bohannan was madness, mirage, desertio