The Sheik

And now? The longing to hold her in his arms, to kiss the tears from

her eyes and the colour into her pale lips, was almost unbearable. He

would give his life to keep even a shadow from her path, and she was in

the hands of Ibraheim Omair! The thought and all that it implied was

torture, but no sign escaped him of the hell he was enduring. The

unavoidable delay seemed interminable, and he swung into the saddle,

hoping that the waiting would seem less with The Hawk's restless,

nervous body gripped between his knees, for though the horse would

stand quietly with his master beside him, he fretted continually at

waiting once the Sheik was mounted, and the necessity for soothing him

was preferable to complete inaction.

Saint Hubert rose to his feet at last, and, leaving behind Henri and

two Arabs, who were detailed to take the wounded man back to the camp,

the swift gallop southward was resumed. On, over the rising and falling

ground along which Gaston had stumbled, blind and faint with loss of

blood and the pain of his wounds, past the dead body of The Dancer,

ghostly white in the moonlight, lying a little apart from the

semicircle of Arabs that proved the efficiency of Gaston's shooting

where Diana and he had made their last stand. The Sheik made no sign

and did not check the headlong gallop, but continued on, The Hawk

taking the fallen bodies that lay in his path in his stride, with only

a quiver of repugnance and a snort of disgust. Still on, past the

huddled bundles of tumbled draperies that marked the way significantly,

avoiding them where the moonlight illuminated brightly, and riding over

them in the deep hollows, where once Raoul's horse stumbled badly and

nearly fell, recovering himself with a wild scramble, and the Vicomte

heard the dead man's skull crack under the horse's slipping hoof.

The distant howling of jackals came closer and closer until, topping

one long rise and descending into a hollow that was long enough and

wide enough to be fully lit by the moon, they came to the place where

the ambush had been laid. Instinctively Ahmed Ben Hassan knew that

amongst the jostling heaps of corpses and dead horses lay the bodies of

his own men. Perhaps amongst the still forms from which the jackals,

whose hideous yelling they had heard, had slunk away, there might be

one left with life enough to give some news. One of his own men who

would speak willingly, or one of Ibraheim Omair's who would be made to

speak. His lips curled back from his white teeth in a grin of pure

cruelty.