"Click-click-click!" mocked the hammer of Rankin's .45 as it fell on a succession of empty chambers.
The red-bearded chief smiled. And Rankin knew that more than his own carelessness was responsible for the unloading of that revolver. Someone had worked fast and skilfully as Rankin reclined in the souk that afternoon, smoking a narghileh, sipping bitter Abyssinian coffee, and pondering on how to extricate the lady Azizah from the peril that was descending from the mountains of Kurdistan.
Shoulder to shoulder the assailants advanced. Their steps were deliberate, now that they were certain rather than hopeful that the .45 had not been reloaded. Six lean swordsmen from the desert, grim phantoms whose curved blades gleamed frostily in the moonlight; curved scimitars whose drawing cut shears from shoulder to hip with one swift stroke.
Rankin drew his scimitar, cursed the disguise that had forbidden his favorite saber, and came on guard. The six paused a moment in their advance. One of them, they knew, must close with their prey, while the other five hacked him to pieces. And the sentence of that one was written; for their victim's frenzy would not be tempered with any hope of escape. One of them was even now a dead man....
One ... two ... three paces....
Rankin dropped his point and laughed.
The line wavered. It takes courage to assault a madman.
A long, fierce lunge, and a deadly swift flicker of steel; and Rankin withdrew from the mêlée, on guard again. That sudden assault from beyond probable striking-distance had caught them off balance; one of them was even now a dead man, shorn half asunder.
Then they closed in. Rankin's footwork saved him, and during that instant of grace, his blade again hit deep as he evaded the charge.
"Mashallah!" gasped the red-bearded chief as he spurred his horse a pace forward.