ust into their
breasts--breasts whose sin was fidelity to the vanquished.

They had vengeance to do that made every stroke seem righteous and holy
in their sight; that nerved each of their bare and sinewy arms as with
the strength of a thousand limbs. Right--so barren, so hopeless, so
unavailing--had long been with them. Now to it was added at last
the power of might; and they exercised the power with the savage
ruthlessness of the desert. They closed in on every side; wheeling
their swift coursers hither and thither; striking with lance and blade;
hemming in, beyond escape, the doomed fragment of the Frankish squadron
till there remained of them but one small nucleus, driven close
together, rather as infantry will form than as cavalry usually does--a
ring of horsemen, of which every one had his face to the foe; a solid
circle curiously wedged one against the other, with the bodies of
chargers and of men deep around them, and with the ground soaked with
blood till the sand was one red morass.

Cecil held the Eagle still, and looked round on the few left to him.

"You are sons of the Old Guard; die like them."

They answered with a pealing cry, terrible as the cry of the lion in
the hush of night, but a shout that had in it assent, triumph, fealty,
victory, even as they obeyed him and drew up to die, while in their
front was the young brow of Petit Picpon turned upward to the glare of
the skies.

There was nothing for them but to draw up thus, and await their
butchery, defending the Eagle to the last; looking till the last toward
that "woman's face of their leader," as they had often termed it, that
was to them now as the face of Napoleon was to the soldiers who loved
him.

There was a pause, brief as is the pause of the lungs to take a fuller
breath. The Arabs honored these men, who alone and in the midst of the
hostile force, held their ground and prepared thus to be slaughtered one
by one, till of all the squadron that had ridden out in the darkness of
the dawn there should be only a black, huddled, stiffened heap of
dead men and of dead beasts. The chief who led them pressed them back,
withholding them from the end that was so near to their hands when they
should stretch that single ring of horsemen all lifeless in the dust.

"You are great warriors," he cried, in the Sabir tongue; "surrender; we
will spare!"

Cecil looked back once more on the fragment of his troop, and raised
the Eagle higher aloft where