ing dawn two
other travelers from the north, a pair on a powerful but tired black
horse, a man in a military cloak and a green and gold turban about
his bronzed head, and behind him, on a pillion, a black-mantled,
black-veiled girl, with bare, dangling feet.

It was Aimee who had evolved the disguise, constructing the turban
from the negligee beneath her mantle, and it was Aimee who bargained
with the villagers for their breakfast, eggs and goats' milk and
bread and rice, while her lord, as befitted his dignity, stayed
aloof upon his steed, returning a courteous response of "_Allah
salimak_--God bless you" to their greetings.

Then as the day brightened and the last soft veil of mist was
burned away before a blood-red sun, that pair of travelers left the
highroad and turned west upon a byway that led past fields of corn
and yellow water and mud villages where goats and naked babies and
ragged women squatted idly in the dust, and on through low,
red-granite hills swirled about with yellow sand drift and out into
the desert beyond.

Here fresh vigor came to the Arab horse, and tossing his mane and
stretching out his nostrils to the dry air he broke into a gallop
that sent sand and pebbles flying from his hoofs. To right and left
the startled desert hares scattered, and from the clumps of spiky
helga the black vultures rose in heavy-winged flight.

Then the breeze dropped, and the swift-coming heat rushed at them
like a furnace breath, and slower and slower they made their way,
Ryder leading the jaded horse and Aimee nodding in the saddle, mere
crawling specks across the immensity of sand.

Then, in the shade of a huge clump of gray-green _mit minan_ beside
a jutting boulder they stopped at last to rest. The horse sank on
his knees; Ryder spread out his cloak and Aimee dropped down upon
its folds, lost in exhausted sleep as soon as her head touched the
sands. Ryder, his back against the rock, kept watch.

It was not the exultant Ryder of that first hour of flight. The
excitement of the night had subsided and withdrawn its wild
stimulation. It was a hot and tired and immensely sobered young man
who sat there with eyes that burned from lack of sleep and a brow
knit into a taut and anxious line.

Realization flooded him with the sun. Responsibility burned in upon
him with the heat.

Alone in the Libyan desert he sat there, and at his feet there slept
the young girl whose life he had snapped utterly off from its roo