When Sir Richard had ridden away, sitting squarely in his saddle, with never a backward look, Anstice turned to Hassan.
"Now," he said, "how do we proceed? I mean"—he remembered that the man understood little English—"do we go straight back to the village—and what do we do with this horse?"
Hassan's explanation was necessarily somewhat unintelligible, being couched in a polyglot mixture of French and English, with a few words of Arabic thrown in, but by dint of patient inquiry Anstice presently made out the drift of his involved speech. Briefly, his plan was as follows.
It would be useless, so Hassan asserted, to attempt to return to the village and enter the Fort until darkness covered the land. The Bedouins, it seemed, already surrounded the place so that Hassan's escape had been a matter of some difficulty, and it would be necessary to proceed cautiously, with careful strategy, in order to re-enter the place in safety.
When once it was comparatively dark—if possible before the moon rose—the attempt must be made; and in the meantime Hassan considered the wisest thing to do was to shelter somewhere and rest in preparation for the evening's adventures.
The horse, he decided, must be turned loose outside the village. The Bedouins, as he pointed out, would be likely to snap up readily a horse of such good appearance, and in any case Hassan was plainly of the opinion that a horse's existence was of very little importance when graver matters were at stake.
Although, as an Englishman, Anstice was inclined to rate the horse's value as a living creature more highly than the Arab was disposed to do, he saw the reason of the plan, and agreed to follow Hassan's advice in every particular.
Having come to this wise resolve, he invited Hassan to choose a place where the time of waiting might be passed, and the native deciding on a little sandy hollow between two low, round-backed hills, he proceeded to ensconce himself more or less comfortably on the loose and drifting sand, and prepared to endure the waiting-time with what patience he might.