"So can Nevill. I'm no spoil-sport," snapped the old lady, in her childlike voice. "I know what I can do and what I can't. I draw the line at camels! Angus and Hamish will take care of me, and I'll wait for you at Touggourt. I can amuse myself in the market-place, and looking at the Ouled Naïls, till you find Miss Ray, or——"
"There won't be an 'or,' Lady MacGregor. We must find her. And we must bring her to you," said Stephen.
He had slept in the carriage the night before, a little on the Biskra side of Chegga, because Maïeddine and the French officer had rested at Chegga. Nevill and Lady MacGregor had started from Biskra at five o'clock that morning, having arrived there the evening before. It was now ten, and they could make Touggourt that night. But they wished Maïeddine to reach there first, so they stopped by the chott, and lunched from a smartly fitted picnic-basket Lady MacGregor had brought. Stephen paid his Arab coachman, told him he might go back, and transferred a small suitcase—his only luggage—from the carriage to the car. They gave Maïeddine two hours' grace, and having started on, always slowed up whenever Nevill's field-glasses showed a slowly trotting vehicle on the far horizon. The road, which was hardly a road, far exceeded in roughness the desert track Stephen had wondered at on the way from Msila to Bou-Saada; but Lady MacGregor had the courage, he told her, of a Joan of Arc.
They bumped steadily along, through the heat of the day, protected from the blazing sun by the raised hood, but they were thankful when, after the dinner-halt, darkness began to fall. Talking over ways and means, they decided not to drive into Touggourt, where an automobile would be a conspicuous object since few motors risked springs and tyres by coming so far into the desert. The chauffeur should be sent into the town while the passengers sat in the car a mile away.
Eventually Paul was instructed to demand oil for his small lamps, by way of an excuse for having tramped into town. He was to find out what had become of the two men who must have arrived about an hour before, in a carriage.
While the chauffeur was gone, Lady MacGregor played Patience and insisted on teaching Stephen and Nevill two new games. She said that it would be good discipline for their souls; and so perhaps it was. But Stephen never ceased calculating how long Paul ought to be away. Twenty minutes to walk a mile—or thirty minutes in desert sand; forty minutes to make inquiries; surely it needn't take longer! And thirty minutes back. But an hour and a half dragged on, before there was any sign of the absentee; then at last, Stephen's eye, roving wistfully from the cards, saw a moving spark at about the right height above the ground to be a cigarette.
A few yards away from the car, the spark vanished decorously, and Paul was recognizable, in the light of the inside electric lamp, the only illumination they allowed themselves, lest the stranded car prove attractive to neighbouring nomads.
The French officer was at the hotel for the night; the Arab was dining with him, but instead of resting, would go on with his horse and a Negro servant who, it seemed, had been waiting for several days, since their master had passed through Touggourt on the way to Algiers.
"Then he didn't come from El Aghouat," said Nevill. "Where is he going? Did you find out that?"
"Not for certain. But an Arab servant who talks French, says he believes they're bound for a place called Oued Tolga," Paul replied, delighted with the confidence reposed in him, and with the whole adventure.