Once over, it seemed to Pansy that the last obstacle between herself and freedom had been circumvented.
She leant forward, patting her horse encouragingly.
"Oh, Sultan," she said hysterically. "I don't mind where you take me, so long as I can get away from here."
Left to itself, after the manner of horses, the animal picked the route it knew the best; the sandy track along which the Sultan Casim generally took it for exercise.
For the first mile or so Pansy was conscious of nothing except that she had escaped—escaped from a love she could not conquer, a man she could not hate.
White and billowy the world lay around her, an undulating sea of sand with only one dark patch upon it, the city of El-Ammeh. The track the horse followed wound through tufted hillocks, mounds of silver in the moonlight. Here and there a stunted shrub cast black lines on the all-prevailing whiteness.
At the end of an hour Pansy discovered she was not the rider she once was. Her months of confinement had left her sadly "out of form." She was worn out with the exertion and the excitement of escape. It took all her skill to keep her seat on the horse. And the animal knew, for it slackened speed as a good horse will when conscious of a tired rider.
Others, also, seemed aware that something weak and helpless was abroad, and with the strange magnetism of the wild they were drawn towards the girl.
Here and there in the melting, misty distance, a dark form appeared, lopping along at a safe range, keeping pace with the old horse and its rider, every now and again glancing at the two with glaring green eyes, and calling one to another with shrieks of maniacal laughter.
Pansy hardly heard the hyenas. She was too intent on keeping her seat. But the horse heard them and he snorted with rage and fear.