"It does, rather," Max admitted, still apologetically, because he could not bear to have Sanda suffer for him. "But it"s a painless sort of an end, not a bad one, if it wasn"t for--for----"
"For leaving me alone. I understand. And because you may have to--very soon, though I pray not--I shall tell you what I never would have told you except for this. Only, if you get well, you must promise not to speak of it to me--nor even to seem to remember; and truly to forget, if you can."
"I promise," Max said.
"It"s this: I know you care for me, Max, and I care for you, too, dearly, dearly. All the love I had ready for Richard flowed away from him, like a river whose course had been changed in a night by a tremendous shock of earthquake. Gradually it turned toward you. You won it. You deserve it. I should be a wretch--I shouldn"t be natural if I didn"t love you! That"s all I had to tell. I couldn"t let you go without knowing. And if you do go, I shall follow you soon, because I couldn"t live through a day more of my awful life without you."
"Now I _know_ that I can"t die!" Max"s voice rang out. "If there was poison in my blood, it"s killed with the joy of what you"ve said to me."
"Joy!" Sanda echoed. "There can be no joy for us in loving each other, only sorrow."
"There"s joy in love itself," said Max. "Just in knowing."
"Though we"re never to speak of it again?"
"Even though we"re never to speak of it again."
So they came to Sanda"s tent; and Stanton, sitting in his open doorway, saw them arrive together. With great strides he crossed the strip of desert between the two tents, and thrust his red face close to the blanched face of Max. His eyes spoke the ugly thing that was in his mind before his lips could utter it. But Sanda gave him no time for words that would be unforgivable.
"I had gone to the river," she said, with a hint of pride and command in her voice that Max had never heard from her. It forbade doubt and rang clear with courage. "Monsieur St. George was afraid for me, and came to bring me back. On the way he killed a viper that would have bitten me, and was bitten himself. He has cut out the flesh round the wound and cauterized it; and he will live, please G.o.d, with care and rest."
Taken aback by the challenging air of one who usually shrank from him, Stanton was silenced. Sanda"s words and manner carried conviction; and even before she spoke he had failed in goading himself to believe evil.
Drunk, he had for the moment lost all instincts of a gentleman; but, though somehow the impulse to insult Sanda was beaten down, the wish to punish her survived. Max"s wound and the fever sure to follow, if he lived, gave Stanton a chance for revenge on both together, which appealed to the cruelty in him. Besides, it offered the brutal opening he wanted to show his authority over the sullenly mutinous men.
"Sorry, but St. George will have to do the best he can without rest,"
Stanton announced harshly. "We start at four-thirty. It is to be a surprise call."
"But we were to stop till to-morrow and refit!" Sanda protested in horror.
"I"ve changed my mind. We don"t need to refit. In five hours we shall be on the march."
"No!" cried Sanda. "You want to kill my only friend, but you shall not.
You know that rest is his one chance, and you"d take it away. I won"t have it so. He stays here, and I stay with him."
"Stay and be d.a.m.ned," Stanton bawled.
The men sitting by the distant fire heard the angry roar, and some jumped to their feet, expecting an alarm.
"Stay and be d.a.m.ned, and may the vultures pick the flesh off your lover"s bones, while the sheikh takes you to his harem. He"s welcome to you," Stanton finished.
Before the words were out Max leaped at the Chief"s throat. All the advantage of youth was his, against the other"s bulk; but as he sprang Ahmara bounded on him from behind, winding her arms around his body and throwing on him all her weight. It made him stagger, and, s.n.a.t.c.hing up the heavy campstool on which he had been sitting, Stanton struck Max with it on the head. Weakened already by the anguish in the torn nerves of his hand (most painful centre for a wound in all the body), Max fell like a log, and lay unconscious while Ahmara wriggled herself free.
"He asked for that, and now he"s got it," said Stanton, panting. "Serve him right, and n.o.body will blame me if he"s dead. But he isn"t, no fear!
Fellows like him belong to the leopard tribe, and have as many lives as a cat. Good girl, Ahmara, many thanks."
And without another glance toward Max, beside whom Sanda was on her knees, Stanton threw the campstool into the tent and yelled to the men by the fire. He called the names of two who were his special servants, but most of the band followed, knowing from the roar of rage and the one sharp cry in a woman"s voice that something important had happened.
Stanton was glad when he saw the dark crowd troop toward him, though in his first flush of excitement he had not thought to summon every one.
"Come on, all of you!" he shouted. "Now halt! You see the man lying there--at my feet, where he belongs. He was my trusted lieutenant, but he took too much upon himself. I knocked him down for insubordination.
He doesn"t go farther with the caravan. And we start in five hours. Zaid and Mahmoud, put this carrion out of my sight. I"ve shown you all what happens when black or white men disobey my orders."
No one came forward. From her knees beside Max Sanda rose up slim and straight and stood facing the Arabs and negroes.
"Men," she cried to them, "I"ve done my best for you. I"ve defended you, when I could, from injustice. When you have been sick with fevers or with wounds I have nursed you. Now my father"s friend, and my friend, who to-night has saved my life, lies wounded. If you leave him, you leave me, too, for I stay as his nurse. What do you decide?"
Stanton was on her in two strides. Seizing her arm he twisted it with a savage wrench and flung her tottering behind him. The pain forced a cry from the girl, and Ahmara laughed. That was more than the men could stand, for to them Sanda was always the White Angel, Ahmara the Black; and over there by the fire they had discussed a deputation to Stanton, announcing that, since starting, they had heard too much evil of the haunted Libyan desert to dare venture across its waterless wastes. The spirit of mutiny was in them, having smouldered and flashed up, smouldered and flamed again at Stanton"s cruelty. This was too much! The spark was fired. A Senegalese whom Sanda had cured of a scorpion bite--a black giant to whom Max had lent his camel when Stanton would have left him in the desert--leaped like a tiger on the Chief. Steel flashed under the moon, and Stanton fell back without a groan, striking the hard sand and staining it red.
For an instant there was silence. Then burst forth a wild shout of hate and joy....
CHAPTER XXIX
OUT OF THE DREAM, A PLAN
Stanton was dead, hacked in pieces by the men he had cursed and beaten.
Ahmara had fled to Darda to live as she could by her beauty; and the murderers, taking with them, in a rage of haste and terror, camels, water, and provisions, had disappeared. The caravan of the great explorer had vanished like a mirage; and the Lost Oasis lay hidden forever from despoiling eyes and hands in the uncharted Libyan desert.
At dawn Sanda sat beside Max in his tent, where two of the few men who remained had carried him. Through the hideous hours he had lain as one dead. But light, touching his eyelids, waked him with a shuddering start.
"You!" he whispered. "Safe! I"ve had horrible dreams."
"Only dreams," she soothed him.
"How pale you are!" He stared at her, still half dazed.
"Perhaps it"s the light."
"No, it"s not the light. I remember now.... What happened after he--I----"
"I"ll tell you when you"re stronger."
"I"m strong enough for anything. Only a little odd in my head."
"And your poor wounded hand? I bathed it and bandaged it again, and you never knew."
"Queer! I thought if I were dead I should have known if you touched me!"
He spoke more to himself than to Sanda, and she did not answer. His eyelids drooped, and presently he slept again. Hours later, when he woke, she was still there. It seemed to the girl that the world had fallen to pieces, leaving only her and this man in the ruins. All around them lay the vast desert. To go back whence they had come was impossible. To go on seemed equally impossible. There was nowhere to go.
But they were together. She knew that nothing could part them now, not life, and even less death, yet she could see no future. Everything had come to a standstill, and their souls might as well be out of their bodies. It would be so much simpler!
She gave Max tea that she had made; and when she had looked at his hand and bandaged it again, she told him all that had happened. How the Senegalese, whose brother Stanton had shot for pilfering, a month ago, had stabbed Stanton in the breast, and fifty others in blood-madness had rushed to finish his work. How Ahmara had run shrieking to the village, and the men, still in madness, had stolen the camels and gone off into the desert; not the murderers only, but their friends who saw that it was well to disappear, that it might never be known who were the men that saw Richard Stanton die.
Two months and more ago, when the caravan left Touggourt, there were over a hundred men who marched with it. Between that time and reaching Darda thirty had deserted, and a few had died. Now all had flown except a dozen of the oldest and most responsible who refused to be carried away by their comrades" vague fear of reprisals. Just these twelve were left with fifteen camels and a small store of arms and provisions. There was money also, untouched in Stanton"s tent, and some bales of European rugs, clocks, and musical boxes, which the explorer had brought as gifts for native rulers. The question pressed: what was to be done? Sanda could find no answer; but Max had two. They might turn back and go the way they had come. Or they might go on, not trying to cross the Libyan desert in the direction of a.s.souan, as Stanton had hoped to do, but skirting southward by a longer route where the desert was charted and oases existed. After a journey of seventy or eighty days they might hope to find their way through Kordofan to Omdurman, and then across the Nile to civilized Khartoum. It was this idea that the leading mutineers, frightened by tales of the terrible Libyan desert, had meant to suggest to Stanton; and if he refused their intention had been to desert. The murder, Max felt sure, had not been premeditated; but he did not believe that it was regretted.
"I will not go back to Touggourt," Sanda said, when he had described to her the two plans.