The other hesitated for an instant, then replied briskly, as if he had calculated everything in detail. This was characteristic of him, to map out a plan of campaign as he went along, as fast as he drew breath for the rushing words. Often he had made his greatest impressions, his greatest successes, in this wild way.
"Why, you will pitch your camp here for the night, instead of marching on to Touggourt," he said. "I camp here, too. My expedition is delayed for one day more, but what does that matter after a hundred delays? Heavens! I've had to wait for tents a beast of a Jew contracted to give me and didn't. I've waited to test water-skins. I've waited for new camel-men when old ones failed me. Haven't I a right to wait a few hours for a companion—a wife? The first thing in the morning we'll have the priest out from Touggourt. Sanda's Catholic. He'll marry us and we'll start on together."
"Couldn't we," the girl rather timidly ventured the suggestion, "couldn't we go to Touggourt? There must be a church there if there's a priest, and I—I'd like to be married in a church."
"My darling child! The priest shall consecrate a tent, or a bit of the desert," Stanton answered with decision, which, she must have realized, would be useless to combat. "He'll do it all right! Marriage ceremonies are performed by Catholic priests in houses, you know, if the man or the woman is ill; deathbed marriages, and—but don't let us talk of such things! I know I can make him do this when I show him how impossible it would be for us to go back to Touggourt. Why, the men I've got together, mostly blacks, would take it for a bad omen if I left the escort stranded here in the desert the first day out! Half of them would bolt. I'd have the whole work to do over again. You see that, don't you?"
Sanda did see; and even Max admitted to himself that the excuse was plausible. Yet he suspected another reason behind the one alleged. Stanton was afraid of things Sanda might hear in Touggourt; perhaps he feared some more active peril.
"I thought," Max dared to argue, "that it took days arranging the legal part of a marriage? You're an Englishman, Mr. Stanton, and Colonel DeLisle's daughter's a French subject, though she is half British. You may find difficulties."
"Damn difficulties!" exclaimed Stanton, all his savage impatience of opposition breaking out at last. "Don't you say so, Sanda? When a man and woman need each other's companionship in lonely places outside the world, is the world's red tape going to make a barrier between them? My God, no! Sanda, if your church will give you to me, and send us into the desert with its blessing, is it, or is it not, enough for you? If not, you're not the girl I want. You're not my woman."
"If you love me, I am 'your woman,'" said Sanda.
"You hear her?" Stanton asked. "If it's enough for her, I suppose it's enough for you, St. George?"
Through the blue dusk two blue eyes stared into Max's face. They put a question without words. "Have you any reason of your own for wanting to keep her from me?"