"Come on, all of you!" he shouted. "Now halt! You see the man lying there—at my feet, where he belongs. He was my trusted lieutenant, but he took too much upon himself. I knocked him down for insubordination. He doesn't go farther with the caravan. And we start in five hours. Zaid and Mahmoud, put this carrion out of my sight. I've shown you all what happens when black or white men disobey my orders."
No one came forward. From her knees beside Max Sanda rose up slim and straight and stood facing the Arabs and negroes.
"Men," she cried to them, "I've done my best for you. I've defended you, when I could, from injustice. When you have been sick with fevers or with wounds I have nursed you. Now my father's friend, and my friend, who to-night has saved my life, lies wounded. If you leave him, you leave me, too, for I stay as his nurse. What do you decide?"
Stanton was on her in two strides. Seizing her arm he twisted it with a savage wrench and flung her tottering behind him. The pain forced a cry from the girl, and Ahmara laughed. That was more than the men could stand, for to them Sanda was always the White Angel, Ahmara the Black; and over there by the fire they had discussed a deputation to Stanton, announcing that, since starting, they had heard too much evil of the haunted Libyan desert to dare venture across its waterless wastes. The spirit of mutiny was in them, having smouldered and flashed up, smouldered and flamed again at Stanton's cruelty. This was too much! The spark was fired. A Senegalese whom Sanda had cured of a scorpion bite—a black giant to whom Max had lent his camel when Stanton would have left him in the desert—leaped like a tiger on the Chief. Steel flashed under the moon, and Stanton fell back without a groan, striking the hard sand and staining it red.
For an instant there was silence. Then burst forth a wild shout of hate and joy....
CHAPTER XXIX
OUT OF THE DREAM, A PLAN
Stanton was dead, hacked in pieces by the men he had cursed and beaten. Ahmara had fled to Dardaï to live as she could by her beauty; and the murderers, taking with them, in a rage of haste and terror, camels, water, and provisions, had disappeared. The caravan of the great explorer had vanished like a mirage; and the Lost Oasis lay hidden forever from despoiling eyes and hands in the uncharted Libyan desert.
At dawn Sanda sat beside Max in his tent, where two of the few men who remained had carried him. Through the hideous hours he had lain as one dead. But light, touching his eyelids, waked him with a shuddering start.