With deference the Arab officers listened to his instructions, then they bowed and left the royal presence.
Not long afterwards the glade was practically empty save for the tents and camels and mules.
At the head of his men the Sultan Casim Ammeh had gone in quest of the vengeance he had waited quite sixteen years for.
CHAPTER IV
In the guard-house of the old fort where George Barclay had once housed his wounded Arab prisoners, Captain Cameron sat propped up with pillows in a camp bed. It was a cool, dim, white-washed room with thick stone walls, tiny windows high up near the ceiling, and a strong wooden door, that was barred from the inside.
Beside him Pansy sat, pouring out the tea that his orderly had just brought in, and trying to coax an appetite that malaria had left capricious.
Cameron's fever had burnt itself out in twenty-four hours as such fevers will, but it had left the young man very weak and washed out, scarcely able to stand on his legs.
As Pansy sat talking and coaxing, trying to make a sick man forget his sickness, into the stillness of the drowsy afternoon there came a sound that neither of them expected. The thunder of horses' hoofs, like a regiment sweeping towards them.
As far as Cameron knew there were no horses in the district except their own, and they numbered only about half a dozen, not enough to produce anything like that amount of sound.