The Sheik

Diana was growing impatient. It was very fine to watch,

but time and the light were both going. She would have been glad if the

demonstration had occurred earlier in the day, when there would have

been more time to enjoy it. She turned again to Mustafa Ali to suggest

that they had better try to move on, but he had gone further from her,

back towards his own. She wrestled with her nervous mount, trying to

turn him to join her guide, when a sudden burst of rifle shots made her

start and her horse bound violently. Then she laughed. That would be

the end of the demonstration, a parting salute, the decharge de

mousqueterie beloved of the Arab. She turned her head from her

refractory horse to look at them ride off, and the laugh died away on

her lips. It was not a farewell salute. The rifles that the Arabs were

firing were not pointing up into the heavens, but aiming straight at

her and her escort. And as she stared with suddenly startled eyes,

unable to do anything with her plunging horse, Mustafa Ali's men were

blotted out from her sight, cut off by a band of Arabs who rode between

her and them. Mustafa Ali himself was lying forward on the neck of his

horse, who was standing quiet amidst the general confusion. Then there

came another volley, and the guide slid slowly out of his saddle on to

the ground, and at the same time Diana's horse went off with a wild

leap that nearly unseated her.

Until they started shooting the thought that the Arabs could be hostile

had not crossed her mind. She imagined that they were merely showing

off with the childish love of display which she knew was

characteristic. The French authorities had been right after all.

Diana's first feeling was one of contempt for an administration that

made possible such an attempt so near civilisation. Her second a

fleeting amusement at the thought of how Aubrey would jeer. But her

amusement passed as the real seriousness of the attack came home to

her. For the first time it occurred to her that her guide's descent

from his saddle was due to a wound and not to the fear that she had at

first disgustedly attributed to him. But nobody had seemed to put up

any kind of a fight, she thought wrathfully. She tugged angrily at her

horse's mouth, but the bit was between his teeth and he tore on

frantically. Her own position made her furious. Her guide was wounded,

his men surrounded, and she was ignominiously being run away with by a

bolting horse. If she could only turn the wretched animal. It would

only be a question of ransom, of that she was positive. She must get

back somehow to the others and arrange terms. It was an annoyance, of

course, but after all it added a certain piquancy to her trip, it would

be an experience. It was only a "hold-up." She did not suppose the

Arabs had even really meant to hurt any one, but they were excited and

some one's shot, aimed wide, had found an unexpected billet. It could

only be that.