Allan knew from experience how fire from a steep slope becomes plunging; thus he congratulated himself that the slope for his musketry was one that was parallel to the trajectory of the rifles.
By a single word he could, if necessary, form his men in a rallying square on the crest of the line. As the Bedouins came riding forward, in a disorderly group, at an easy, ambling pace, Allan, by means of his field-glass, was certain that in their leader he recognised the Arab, Zeid-el-Ourdeh, whom he had succoured after his wounds at Kassassin, and sent to the hospital at Ismailia.
He was wearing the same robes with wide sleeves, and the richly embroidered girdle he wore when found near the camp.
'Steady and still, men,' cried Allan, 'and we'll play old gooseberry with these beggars, as we have done everywhere else.'
They were about five hundred paces distant, a range for which the rifles were sighted, when suddenly a Bedouin uttered a shrill cry of alarm, and all began to unsling their firearms. His eye had detected a clay-coloured helmet with its red hackle on the left side.
Ere they could fire a shot, the Highlanders from their cover poured in a deadly fire, and more than twenty men and horses went down in confused heaps; the latter, in the agony of their wounds and terror, kicking and lashing wildly out with their hoofs, raising clouds of sand, while braining the skulls and breaking the limbs of the fallen riders, whether dead or wounded; then shrieks and groans, cries and curses loaded the air, as all who were untouched or able to keep their saddles, after firing, half at random, a ragged volley, wheeled round their light chargers and went off with the speed of the wind.
'Cease firing!' cried Allan Graham; 'we have taught these fellows a lesson severe enough for the day, and I don't think they will venture near Matarieh again.'
In that, however, he was mistaken, as he afterwards found to his cost.
'And now,' he added, as he crossed the line of railway, sword in hand, 'to give water to the wounded, succour any we can, smash all their weapons, and leave them to fate or their returning friends.'
He, with most of his party, approached the place where the victims of the fusilade lay, and, so far as blood, wounds, and agony went, they presented a very dreadful scene, and yet a trifling one when compared with that witnessed so lately in the trenches of Tel-el-Kebir.