Leclair, inappropriately enough, leaped with a shout of: "Vive la France!"
Now only Bohannan, "Captain Alden," and the Master were left.
"You"re next, Major!" the Master ordered, pointing at the inexorable black mouth of the pit, whence rose the thin, wraith-spirals of vapor.
"I"m ready!" exclaimed the major. "Sure, what"s better than a hot bath after the heavy exercise we"ve been having?" His voice rose buoyantly over the drumming roar of the mysterious, underground torrent. "Ready, sir! But if you"ll only give me one wee sup of good liquor, sir, I"ll die like an Irishman and a gentleman--of fortune!"
"No, liquor, Major," the Master answered, shaking his head. "Can"t you see for yourself all the wine-sacks are cut?"
"Cut, is it? Well, well, so they are!" The major blinked redly.
Obviously his confused mind had not grasped the situation. "Well, sure, that"s a pity, now." And he fell to gnawing that tawny mustache of his.
"Come Major, you"re next!" the Master bade him. "Take your wine-skin and jump!"
Clarity of mind for a moment returned to Bohannan. Gallantly he shook hands with the Master, saluted "Captain Alden," and picked up his wine-sack.
"It"s a fine whirl we"ve had," he affirmed, with one of his old-time smiles, his teeth gleaming by the light of the silver lamp in the Master"s hand. "No man could ask a better."
I"d rather have seen what I"ve seen, and done what I"ve done, and now jump to h.e.l.l and gone, than be safe and sound this minute on Broadway.
"Please overlook any little irregularities of conduct, sir My brain, you know, and--well, good-bye!"
Calmly he picked up his sack and without more ado jumped into the void.
"Now," said the Master, when "Captain Alden" and he remained alone.
"Now--you and I!"
"Yes," the woman answered. "You and I, at last!"
The Master set down his lamp on the floor all wet with condensed vapor and wine. He loosened the buckles of her mask, took the mask off and tossed it into the pit.
"Finis, for _that_!" said he, and smiled strangely. "You aren"t going to be handicapped by any mask, in whatever struggle lies ahead of us.
If you get through to the world, and to life again, you get through as a woman.
"If not, you die as one. But the disguise is done with, and gone. You understand me!"
"Yes. I understand," she answered, and stood peering up at him. Not even the white welts and ridges cut in her flesh by the long wearing of the mask could make her face anything but very beautiful. Her wonderful eyes mirrored far more, as they looked into this strange man"s, than would be easy to write down in words.
"I understand," she repeated. "If this is death, I couldn"t have dreamed or hoped for a better one. In that, at least, we can be eternally together--you and I!"
Silence fell, save for the shuddering roar of the black river, that rose with vapors from the dark pit. Man and woman, they searched out each other"s souls with their gaze.
Then all at once the Master took her hand, and brought it to his heart and held it there. The lamp-shine, obliquely striking upward from the floor, cast deep shadows over their faces; and these shadows seemed symbolic of the shadows of death closing about them at this hour of self-revelation.
"Listen," said the Master, in a wholly other voice from any that had ever come from his lips. "I am going to tell you something. At a moment like this, a man speaks only the exact truth. This is the exact truth.
"In all the years of my life and in all my wanderings up and down this world, I have never seen a woman--till now--whom I felt that I could love. I have lived like an anchorite, celled in absolute isolation from womankind. Incredible as it may seem to you, I have never even kissed a woman, with a kiss of love. But--I am going to kiss you, now."
He took her face in both his hands, drew it up for a moment, gazed at it with a fixity of pa.s.sion that seemed to burn. The woman"s eyes drooped shut. Her lips yearned to his. Then his stern arms in-drew her to his breast, and for a moment she remained there, silently.
All at once he put her from him.
"Now, go!" he commanded. "I shall follow, close. And wait for me--if there is any waiting!"
He picked up one of the two remaining wine-sacks, and put it into her hands.
"Cling to this, through everything!" he commanded. "Cling, as you love life. Cling, as you share my hope for what may be, if life is granted us! And--the mercy-bullet, if it comes to that!
"Now--good-bye!"
She smiled silently and was gone.
The Master, now all alone, stood waiting yet a moment. His face was bloodless. His lower lip was mangled, where his teeth had nearly met, through it.
Already, a confused murmur of sound was developing, from the black opening of the pa.s.sage that had led the Legionaries down to this crypt of the wine-sacks and the pit.
He smiled, oddly.
"Many a corpse has been flung down this _oubliette_," said he. "I hate to go, without emptying my pistol into a few more of the Moslem swine, and dropping them down here to join my people. But--I must!"
He bent, gathered together the silver lamps left by his men, and threw them all into the abyss. Blackness, absolute, blotted the reeking chamber from his sight.
The faintest possible aura of light began to loom from the mouth of the pa.s.sage. More distinctly, now, the murmur of Arab voices was becoming audible.
The Master leaped.
Far below, at the bottom of the pit, as the Arabs burst into the wine-vault, sounded a final impact of some heavy body striking swift water that swept it instantly away.
Then silence filled the black, rock-hewn chamber in the labyrinthine depths of Jannati Shahr.
CHAPTER XLIX
THE DESERT
The Desert.
Four men, one woman.
Save for these five living creatures, all was death. All was that great emptiness which the Arabs call "La Siwa Hu"--that is to say, the land "where there is none but He."
Over terrible s.p.a.ces, over immense listening silences of hard, unbroken dunes extending in haggard desolation to fantastic horizons of lurid ardor, hung a heat-quivering air of deathlike stillness.
Redder than blood, a blistering sun-ball was losing itself behind far, iron hills of black basalt. A flaming land it was, naked and bare, scalped and flayed to the very bones of its stark skeleton.
Heavily, and with the dazed look of beings who feel themselves lost yet still are driven by the life within them to press on, the five fugitives--pitiable handful of the Legion--were plodding south-west, toward the sunset.