Perinaud declined to meet these representations in the spirit in which they were made.
"Looters! Robbers of hen roosts!" he cried. "The whole of your thoughts are centered, as ever, on your unworthy stomachs. The compensation for this outrage will be made to the owners from your pay, let me tell you, from your pay! You have raised the country on us with your shootings; within a matter of minutes we shall have the Moors here in earnest, be assured of that!"
Wrathfully he led the way back to the bivouac and carefully extinguished every cinder of the fire.
"And now," he ordered, "our duty is to wait—beside our horses. If it will not inconvenience Monsieur, I should be obliged if he will defer sleeping, for the present. If we are not molested for the next hour or two, it will be different. The moon rises before midnight and after that a couple of sentries will amply suffice."
It was a memory which stayed by Aylmer for many a month—that long, silent, and very weary vigil of the next few hours. He sat, with his back supported by a palm trunk, the haltering rein of his horse in his hand, his eyes trying vainly to pierce the gloom which surrounded him, and his ears strained to attention.
The forest, though in the windless calm not a leaf fluttered, was full of disquieting noises. There were rustlings, faint, half perceptible crackings of twigs, dull, muffled, resistant sounds from the earth which must surely be caused by human footfall. Once his whole frame sprung into startled alertness as a night bird shrieked in the cork branches not twenty yards away. The faint but distinct after-echo of a chorussed sigh told him how a dozen other pulses had leaped with his. The quick, irregular darting run of a small animal—a jerboa or a forest rat—produced a little less disturbing effect. But the soft, stolid breathing of his horse, as its breath beat past his shoulder, was a soothing, soporific sound which his nerves welcomed, yet seemed to protest against as tending to lull him into an unalert insecurity. With a sudden qualm of reproach he found his head dropping sideways and smiting lightly the trunk of the palm. He drew himself up with a quick, decisive tautening of his muscles. He would not sleep; his eyelids almost ached with the intensity with which he held them apart.
Sleep, like fate, is a tricky jade to defy. It was Perinaud's voice, level and stolid, but with a faint note of sarcasm, which aroused him.
"Monsieur may now sleep in comfort if he will," suggested the sergeant. "There is little fear from surprise with such a moon."
Aylmer blinked. The round white orb was sending its rays in full flood through the broad fans of the palm leaves overhead. It tinged the cork trees with silver radiance; it produced an effect of grateful coolness in the cinder-dry thickets and powdery earth. It was as if dew had fallen, a dew of light. And the shadows of the gorge were of a velvet blackness in contrast.
Aylmer looked carefully round. It was as Perinaud said. The forest spaces were clear; one could trace them almost as distinctly as in the daylight. No enemy could steal upon them unseen.