“And sterilized my big knife. I drove the knife through my arm and let the blood soak through my tunic, and then I stabbed the tunic again in the back. It was lucky that I did.”
“What should I have done without you?” she said, as she rested upon the cushions of the divan. She laid a hand gently in his.
“Does the wound hurt, Paul?”
“It throbs a little if I move it. That’s all. It’s nothing.”
“I’ll dress it again to-night,” she said, sleepily, and almost immediately she fell asleep. She slept so deeply, that a muffled roar, which shook the house, did not even trouble her dreams. Paul smiled as he heard that sound. “That’s one of the seventy-five,” he reflected. The guns from the camp at Dar-Debibagh were coming into action.
He left Marguerite sleeping, and climbed again to the roof. The guns were firing to the south of the town, and were still far away. But no man who had fought through the Chaiouïa Campaign could ever forget the tribesmen’s terror of the guns.
“Another day or two!”
Paul counted up the stages of the march of Moinier’s column from Meknes. If only he was quick, so that the tribesmen could not mass between him and Fez! There were houses alight now in Fez-el-Bali. The work of massacre was going on. But let General Moinier hurry, and the guns over there at Dar-Debibagh talk insistently to Fez! Moreover, at five o’clock the rain began again. It fell like javelins, with the thunder of surf upon a beach.