He pulled up his horse at the entrance of the forest and looked back. His eye was caught by the distant shimmer of the sea—the Atlantic. He was going inland among the naked mountains and tawny plains of this alien continent, might never see it again.
The Atlantic!—the same ocean that beat in blue, white and emerald upon the shores of home, within the sound of whose surges he had been born. It was like saying good-by to one’s last remaining friend. He looked upon Sallee. There lay the white town nestling in the bright arm of the Bou Regreg, patched with the deep green of fig and orange groves. There soared the minaret, its tiles a-wink in the sunshine. Below it, slightly to the right, he thought he could distinguish the roof of MacBride’s house—the roof of happy memories. He wondered if Schems-ed-dah were standing on it looking after him. What cursed luck to be kicked out just as he was coming to an understanding with Schems-ed-dah!
CHAPTER XXI
Ortho sat on the bare hillside and watched his horses coming in. They came up the gully below him in a drove, limping from their hobbles—grays, chestnuts, bays, duns and blacks, blacks predominating. It was his ambition to command a squadron of blacks, and he was chopping and changing to that end. They would look well on parade, he thought, a line of glossy black Doukkala stallions with scarlet trappings, bestridden by lancers in the uniform white burnoose—black, white and scarlet. Such a display should catch the Sultan’s eye and he would be made a Kaid Rahal.
He was a Kaid Mia already. Sheer luck had given him his first step.
When he first joined the Makhzen cavalry he found himself stablemates with an elderly Prussian named Fleischmann, who had served with Frederick the Great’s dragoons at Rossbach, Liegnitz and Torgau, a surly, drunken old sabreur with no personal ambition beyond the assimilation of loot, but possessed of experience and a tongue to disclose it. In his sober moments he held forth to Ortho on the proper employment of horse. He did not share the common admiration for the crack askar lances, but poured derision upon them. They were all bluster and bravado, he said, stage soldiers with no real discipline to control them in a tight corner. He admitted they were successful against rebel hordes, but did they ever meet a resolute force he prophesied red-hot disaster and prayed he might not be there.
His prayer was granted. Disaster came and he was not there, having had his head severed from his shoulders a month previously while looting when drunk and meeting with an irritated householder who was sober.
Ortho was in the forefront of the disaster. The black Janizaries, the Bou Khari, were having one of their periodic mutinies and had been drummed into the open by the artillery. The cavalry were ordered to charge. Instead of stampeding when they saw the horse sweeping on them, the negroes lay down, opened a well-directed fire and emptied saddles right and left.
A hundred yards from the enemy the lancers flinched and turned tail, and the Bou Khari brought down twice as many more. Ortho did not turn. In the first place he did not know the others had gone about until it was too late to follow them, and secondly his horse, a powerful entire, was crazy with excitement and had charge of him. He slammed clean through the Bou Khari like a thunderbolt with nothing worse than the fright of his life and a slight flesh wound.
He had a confused impression of fire flashing all about him, bullets whirring and droning round his head, black giants springing up among the rocks, yells—and he was through. He galloped on for a bit, made a wide detour round the flank and got back to what was left of his own ranks.