"That"s a Touareg song," exclaimed Saidee, turning. "It isn"t Arab. I"ve heard Touaregs sing it, coming to the Zaoua."
"Madame is right," said the landlord. "I, too, have heard Touaregs sing it, in their own country, and also when they have pa.s.sed here, in small bands. Perhaps we have deceived ourselves. Perhaps we are not to enjoy the pleasure of a fight. I feared it was too good to be true."
"I can see a caravan," cried Nevill, from his cell in a wall-tower.
"There seem to be a lot of men."
"Would they come like that, if they wanted to fight?" asked the girl.
"Wouldn"t they spread out, and hope to surprise us?"
"They"ll either try to rush the gate, or else they"ll pretend to be a peaceful caravan," said Stephen.
"I see! Get the landlord to let their leaders in, and then.... That"s why they sing the Touareg song, perhaps, to put us off our guard."
"Into the dining-room, both of you, and have courage! Whatever happens, don"t come out. Will you give me the mirror?"
"Must you go?"
"Yes. Be quick, please."
On the threshold of the dining-room Victoria opened her bag, and gave him a mirror framed in silver. It had been a present from an enthusiastic millionairess in New York, who admired her dancing. That seemed very odd now. The girl"s hand trembled as for an instant it touched Stephen"s. He pressed her fingers, and was gone.
"Babe, I think this will be the last night of my life," said Saidee, standing behind the girl, in the doorway, and pressing against her.
"Ca.s.sim will kill me, when he kills the men, because I know his secret and because he hates me. If I could only have had a little happiness! I don"t want to die. I"m afraid. And it"s horrible to be killed."
"I love being alive, but I want to know what happens next," said Victoria. "Sometimes I want it so much, that I almost long to die. And probably one feels brave when the minute comes. One always does, when the great things arrive. Besides, we"re sure it must be glorious as soon as we"re out of our bodies. Don"t you know, when you"re going to jump into a cold bath, you shiver and hesitate a little, though you know perfectly well it will be splendid in an instant. Thinking of death"s rather like that."
"You haven"t got to think of it for yourself to-night. Maeddine will----"
"No," the girl broke in. "I won"t go with Maeddine."
"If they take this place--as they must, if they"ve brought many men, you"ll have to go, unless----"
"Yes; "unless." That"s what I mean. But don"t ask me any more. I--I can"t think of ourselves now."
"You"re thinking of some one you love better than you do me."
"Oh, no, not better. Only----" Victoria"s voice broke. The two clung to each other. Saidee could feel how the girl"s heart was beating, and how the sobs rose in her throat, and were choked back.
Victoria watched the tower, that looked like a jagged black tear in the star-strewn blue fabric of the sky. And she listened. It seemed as if her very soul were listening.
The wild Touareg chant was louder now, but she hardly heard it, because her ears strained for some sound which the singing might cover: the sound of rubble crumbling under a foot that climbed and sought a holding-place.
From far away came the barking of Kabyle dogs, in distant camps of nomads. In stalls of the bordj, where the animals rested, a horse stamped now and then, or a camel grunted. Each slightest noise made Victoria start and tremble. She could be brave for herself, but it was harder to be brave for one she loved, in great danger.
"They"ll be here in ten minutes," shouted Nevill. "Legs, where are you?"
There was no answer; but Victoria thought she heard the patter of falling sand. At least, the ruin stood firm so far. By this time Stephen might have nearly reached the top. He had told her not to leave the dining-room, and she had not meant to disobey; but she had made no promise, and she could bear her suspense no longer. Where she stood, she could not see into the sh.e.l.l of the broken tower. She must see!
Running out, she darted across the courtyard, pausing near the Frenchman, Pierre Rostafel, who wandered unsteadily up and down the quadrangle, his torch of alfa gra.s.s ready in his hand. He did not know that one of the Englishmen was trying to climb the tower, and would not for an instant have believed that any human being could reach the upper chamber, if suddenly a light had not flashed out, at the top, seventy feet above his head.
Dazed already with absinthe, fantastic ideas beat stupidly upon his brain, like bats that blunder against a lamp and extinguish it with foolish, flapping wings. He thought that somehow the enemy must have stolen a march upon the defenders: that the hated Arabs had got into the tower, from a ladder raised outside the wall, and that soon they would be pouring down in a swarm. Before he knew what he was doing, he had stumbled up the stairs on to the flat wall by the gate. Scrambling along with his torch, he got on to the bordj roof, and lit bonfire after bonfire, though Victoria called on him to stop, crying that it was too soon--that the men outside would shoot and kill him who would save them all.
The sweet silence of the starry evening was crashed upon with lights and jarring sounds.
Stephen, who had climbed the tower with a lantern and a kitchen lamp-reflector slung in a table-cover, on his back, had just got his makeshift apparatus in order, and standing on a narrow shelf of floor which overhung a well-like abyss, had begun his signalling to the northward.
Too late he realized that, for all the need of haste, he ought to have waited long enough to warn the drunken Frenchman what he meant to do. If he had, this contretemps would not have happened. His telegraphic flashes, long and short, must have told the enemy what was going on in the tower, but they could not have seen him standing there, exposed like a target to their fire, if Rostafel had not lit the bonfires.
Suddenly a chorus of yells broke out, strange yells that sprang from savage hearts; and one sidewise glance down showed Stephen the desert illuminated with red fire. He went on with his work, not stopping to count the men on horses and camels who rode fast towards the bordj, though not yet at the foot of that swelling sand hill on which it stood.
But a picture--of uplifted dark faces and pointing rifles--was stamped upon his brain in that one swift look, clear as an impression of a seal in hot wax. He had even time to see that those faces were half enveloped in masks such as he had noticed in photographs of Touaregs, yet he was sure that the twenty or thirty men were not Touaregs. When close to the bordj all flung themselves from their animals, which were led away, while the riders took cover by throwing themselves flat on the sand.
Then they began shooting, but he looked no more. He was determined to keep on signalling till he got an answer or was shot dead.
There were others, however, who looked and saw the faces, and the rifles aimed at the broken tower. The bonfires which showed the figure in the ruined heliographing-room, to the enemy, also showed the enemy to the watchers in the wall-towers, on opposite sides of the gates.
The Highlanders open fire. Their skill as marksmen, gained in the glens and mountains of Sutherlandshire, was equally effective on different game, in the desert of the Sahara. One shot brought a white mehari to its knees. Another caused a masked man in a striped gandourah to wring his hand and squeal.
The whole order of things was changed by the sudden flashes from the height of the dark ruin, and the lighting of the bonfires on the bordj roof.
Two of the masked men riding on a little in advance of the other twenty had planned, as Stephen guessed, to demand admittance to the bordj, declaring themselves leaders of a Touareg caravan on its way to Touggourt. If they could have induced an unsuspecting landlord to open the gates, so much the better for them. If not, a parley would have given the band time to act upon instructions already understood. But Ca.s.sim ben Halim, an old soldier, and Maeddine, whose soul was in this venture, were not the men to meet an emergency unprepared. They had calculated on a check, and were ready for surprises.
It was Maeddine"s camel that went down, shot in the neck. He had been keeping El Biod in reserve, when the splendid stallion might be needed for two to ride away in haste--his master and a woman. As the mehari fell, Maeddine escaped from the saddle and alighted on his feet, his blue Touareg veil disarranged by the shock. His face uncovered, he bounded up the slope with the bullets of Angus and Hamish pattering around him in the sand.
"She"s bewitched, whateffer!" the twins mumbled, each in his watch-tower, as the tall figure sailed on like a war-cloud, untouched.
And they wished for silver bullets, to break the charm woven round the "fanatic" by a wicked spirit.
Over Maeddine"s head his leader was shooting at Stephen in the tower, while Hamish returned his fire, leaving the running man to Angus. But suddenly Angus wheeled after a shot, to yell through the tower door into the courtyard. "Oot o" the way, wimmen! He"s putten gunpowder to the gate if I canna stop him." Then, he wheeled into place, and was entranced to see that the next bullet found its billet under the Arab"s turban. In the orange light of the bonfires, Angus could see a spout of crimson gush down the bronze forehead and over the glittering eyes. But the wounded Arab did not fall back an inch or drop a burden which he carried carefully. Now he was sheltering behind the high, jutting gate-post. In another minute it would be too late to save the gate.
But Angus did not think of Victoria. Nor did Victoria stop to think of herself. Something seemed to say in her heart, "Maeddine won"t let them blow up the gate, if it means your death, and so, maybe, you can save them all."
This was not a thought, since she had no time for thought. It was but a murmur in her brain, as she ran up the steep stairway close to the gate, and climbed on to the wall.
Maeddine, streaming with blood, was sheltering in the narrow angle of the gate-post where the firing from the towers struck the wall instead of his body. He had suspended a cylinder of gunpowder against the gate, and, his hands full of powder to sprinkle a trail, he was ready to make a dash for life when a voice cried his name.
Victoria stood on the high white wall of the bordj, just above the gate, on the side where he had hung the gunpowder. A few seconds more--his soul sickened at the thought. He forgot his own danger, in thinking of hers, and how he might have destroyed her, blotting out the light of his own life.
"Maeddine!" she called, before she knew who had been ready to lay the fuse, and that, instead of crying to a man in the distance, she spoke to one at her feet. He stared up at her through a haze of blood. In the red light of the fire, she was more beautiful even than when she had danced in his father"s tent, and he had told himself that if need be he would throw away the world for her. She recognized him as she looked down, and started back with an impulse to escape, he seemed so near and so formidable. But she feared that, if the gate were blown up, the ruined tower might be shaken down by the explosion. She must stay, and save the gate, until Stephen had reached the ground.
"Thou!" exclaimed Maeddine. "Come to me, heart of my life, thou who art mine forever, and thy friends shall be spared, I promise thee."
"I am not thine, nor ever can be," Victoria answered him. "Go thou, or thou wilt be shot with many bullets. They fire at thee and I cannot stop them. I do not wish to see thee die."
"Thou knowest that while thou art on the wall I cannot do what I came to do," Maeddine said. "If they kill me here, my death will be on thy head, for I will not go without thee. Yet if thou hidest from me, I will blow up the gate."
Victoria did not answer, but looked at the ruined tower. One of its walls and part of another stood firm, and she could not see Stephen in the heliographing-chamber at the top. But through a crack between the adobe bricks she caught a gleam of light, which moved. It was Stephen"s lantern, she knew. He was still there. Farther down, the crack widened.
On his way back, he would see her, if she were still on the wall above the gate. She wished that he need not learn she was there, lest he lose his nerve in making that terrible descent. But every one else knew that she was trying to save the gate, and that while she remained, the fuse would not be lighted. Saidee, who had come out from the dining-room into the courtyard, could see her on the wall, and Rostafel was babbling that she was "une pet.i.te lionne, une merveille de courage et de finesse." The Highlanders knew, too, and were doing their best to rid her of Maeddine, but, perhaps because of the superst.i.tion which made them doubt the power of their bullets against a charmed life, they could not kill him, though his cloak was pierced, and his face burned by a bullet which had grazed his cheek. Suddenly, however, to the girl"s surprise and joy, Maeddine turned and ran like a deer toward the firing line of the Arabs. Then, as the bullets of Hamish and Angus spattered round him, he wheeled again abruptly and came back towards the bordj as if borne on by a whirlwind. With a run, he threw himself towards the gate, and leaping up caught at the spikes for handhold. He grasped them firmly, though his fingers bled, got a knee on the wall, and freeing a hand s.n.a.t.c.hed at Victoria"s dress.