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.