All at once, she fell off and stayed in the sand, half stunned by her fall, conscious of nothing except that she had escaped from the Sultan Casim Ammeh.
When she fell the horse stopped. He stretched a long neck and sniffed and sniffed at her. But since she did not get up, he did not leave her. He waited until she was ready to start off again, quite glad of the rest himself.
However, there was not to be much rest for him.
A shriek of diabolical laughter rang out at his very heels. With a snort of fear and rage, he lashed out. The laughter turned into a howl of pain, and one of the hyenas retreated on three legs, with a broken shoulder.
But there were twenty or more of them now, against one old horse and a girl too utterly exhausted to know even that her life was in danger. And each of the hyenas had a strength of jaw that could break the thigh of an ox, and a cowardice of heart equalled only by their strength.
For sometime they circled round, watching their prey with ravenous, glaring green eyes, and every now and again one or the other made a forward rush, only to find those iron heels between it and its meal. The horse understood being baited in this manner, by foes just beyond his reach. It had been part of the hell the girl he guarded had rescued him from.
As time went on, the hyenas grew bolder.
Once they rushed in a body. But they retreated. One with a broken jaw, one with a mouthful of live flesh torn from "The Sultan's" flank, and one did not retreat at all. It lay with its skull smashed in, its brains bespattering the horse's hoofs—hoofs over which now a red stream oozed, filling the hot night air with the smell of live blood.
A desperate battle raged in the lonely desert under the white light of the moon. A battle that filled the night with the mad mirth of hyenas, and the wild shrieks of a frightened, hurt, infuriated horse—"The Sultan"—fighting as he had fought that day in the East End of London when Pansy had first come across him. But fighting for her life as well as his own, against the cowards that beset him.