“Do not lie to me,” she said curtly. “It avails you nothing. Read that.”
She thrust before him the paper the pigeon had brought; his hand trembled sorely as he held it; he believed in that moment that this strange creature—half soldier, half woman, half brigand, half child—knew all his story and all his shame from his brother.
“Shot!” he echoed hoarsely, as she had done, when he had read on to the end. “Shot! Oh, my God! and I——”
She drew him out of the thoroughfare into a dark recess within the bazaar, he submitting unresistingly. He was filled with the horror, the remorse, the overwhelming shock of his brother's doom.
“He will be shot,” she said with a strange calmness. “We shoot down many men in our army. I knew him well. He was justified in his act, I do not doubt; but discipline will not stay for that—”
“Silence, for mercy's sake! Is there no hope—no possibility?”
Her lips were parched like the desert sand as her dry, hard words came through them. “None. His chief could have cut him down in the instant. It took place in camp. You feel this thing; you are of his race, then?”
“I am his brother!”
She was silent; looking at him fixedly, it did not seem to her strange that she should thus have met one of his blood in the crowds of Algiers. She was absorbed in the one catastrophe whose hideousness seemed to eat her very life away, even while her nerve, and her brain, and her courage remained at their keenest and strongest.
“You are his brother,” she said slowly, so much as an affirmation that his belief was confirmed that she had learned both their relationship and their history from Cecil. “You must go to him, then.”