weeks ago I had sat in my office in a small New England town waiting hopefully for some client or caller. And now with ready rifle I stood on the roof of a small mud fort in the heart of the Sahara, waiting—but not hopefully—for dawn and the Arab horde.
But what of the promised aid I heard the beauty speak of? I had tried to talk with the dark men of the fort, but my efforts brought only smiles and shrugs, though I spoke both English and French, and as a last resort, the Latin learned in my boyhood. Nothing could be gained from the silent Sabbatier, and there was but one other who could tell me. Yet I doubted if
Footsteps sounded, and The Midnight Lady was beside me.
"A dangerous place for dreaming, Brian O'Hara," she smiled, pausing slightly on her inspection tour of the sentries.
"I am getting rather used to danger," I answered with a laugh.
"Now if I had been one of those sneaking Arabs out there," she continued, "it would have been easy to creep upon you and reduce the fort's number, by one at least."
"It does seem to be the general idea out here," I admitted. "Treachery and murder."
"Ah, that's the Sahara," came her answering laugh, as she continued. "When you are not plotting to destroy someone, you are trying to keep someone from destroying you."
A short while later I was escorted to the tiny barracks below the fort, to where its defenders, other than the sentries, had assembled for a few hours of precious sleep. Here I quickly followed the example of the others, and despite the fact there was only the hard sand beneath me (for the fort had long since been abandoned till its recent occupancy) fell into a swift and sound slumber.
How long I slept I know not, but it was to awake with a start, as cries and screamings ran in my ears, over which the shouting voice of Sabbatier reached me:
"Aux armes! Aux armes! Les Arabes! Les Arabes!"
6. Saharah Treachery
As the shouts and screaming reached us in that tiny underground barracks I sprang to my feet, and seizing a rifle, rushed up the stairway, while on all sides, pushing and shoving, came the garrison's ready defenders.
Even as we gained the roof there came a shriek from the lookout platform above us, and the sentry who had been posted there staggered backward. For an instant he stood swaying at its very edge, his hands clawing at the air before him, his features distorted. Then he toppled back, and striking the railing below him in his fall, bounded outward, to come to the roof with a horrible crash.
A moment later found every remaining man of that tiny garrison—for several had already fallen—at the embrasures that encircled the roof, firing like mad at the ghostly figures charging toward us in the faint light of dawn.
There was no denying their bravery. Urged on, perhaps, by the wild promises of De Costa, or the Emir in command, as well as the thoughts of loot and torture, they were as indifferent to our rifle fire as the Spartans of old to the arrows of Persia.
On came the white-robed horsemen. A hundred yards before the fort they divided, and one horde sweeping to the right, another to the left, proceeded to surround us on all sides, while they
