Hour on hour, league on league, passed away; she felt the animal quiver under the spur, and she heard the catch in his panting breath as he strained to give his fleetest and best, that told her how, ere long, the racing speed, the extended gallop at which she kept him, would tell, and beat him down, despite his desert strain. She had no pity; she would have killed twenty horses under her to reach her goal. She was giving her own life, she was willing to lose it, if by its loss she did this thing, to save even the man condemned to die with the rising of the sun. She did not spare herself; and she would have spared no living thing, to fulfill the mission that she undertook. She loved with the passionate blindness of her sex, with the absolute abandonment of the southern blood. If to spare him she must have bidden thousands fall, she would have given the word for their destruction without a moment's pause.
Once, from some screen of gaunt and barren rock, a shot was fired at her, and flew within a hair's breadth of her brain; she never even looked around to see whence it had come; she knew it was from some Arab prowler of the plains. Her single spark of light through the half-veiled lantern passed as swiftly as a shooting-star across the plateau. And as she felt the hours steal on—so fast, so hideously fast—with that horrible relentlessness which tarries for no despair, as it hastens for no desire, her lips grew dry as dust, her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, the blood beat like a thousand hammers on her brain.
What she dreaded came.
Midway in her course, when, by the stars, she knew midnight was passed, the animal strained with hard-drawn, panting gasps to answer the demand made on him by the spur and by the lance-shaft with which he was goaded onward. In the lantern light she saw his head stretched out in the racing agony, his distended eyeballs, his neck covered with foam and blood, his heaving flanks that seemed bursting with every throb that his heart gave; she knew that, half a league more forced from him, he would drop like a dead thing never to rise again. She let the bridle drop upon the poor beast's neck, and threw her arms above her head with a shrill, wailing cry, whose despair echoed over the noiseless plains like the cry of a shot-stricken animal. She saw it all: the breaking of the rosy, golden day; the stillness of the hushed camp; the tread of the few picked men; the open coffin by the open grave; the leveled carbines gleaming in the first rays of the sun. . . She had seen it so many times—seen it to the awful end, when the living man fell down in the morning light a shattered, senseless, soulless, crushed-out mass.
That single moment was all the soldier's nature in her gave to the abandonment of despair, to the paralysis that seized her. With that one cry from the depths of her breaking heart, the weakness spent itself; she knew that action alone could aid him. She looked across, southward and northward, east and west, to see if there were aught near from which she could get aid. If there were none, the horse must drop down to die, and with his life the other life would perish as surely as the sun would rise.
Her gaze, straining through the darkness, broken here and there by fitful gleams of moonlight, caught sight in the distance of some yet darker thing, moving rapidly—a large cloud skimming the earth. She let the horse, which had paused the instant the bridle had touched his neck, stand still a while, and kept her eyes fixed on the advancing cloud till, with the marvelous surety of her desert-trained vision, she disentangled it from the floating mists and wavering shadows and recognized it, as it was, a band of Arabs.
If she turned eastward out of her route, the failing strength of her horse would be fully enough to take her into safety from their pursuit, or even from their perception, for they were coming straightly and swiftly across the plain. If she were seen by them, she was certain of her fate; they could only be the desperate remnant of the decimated tribes, the foraging raiders of starving and desperate men, hunted from refuge to refuge, and carrying fire and sword in their vengeance wherever an unprotected caravan or a defenseless settlement gave them the power of plunder and of slaughter, that spared neither age nor sex. She was known throughout the length and the breadth of the land to the Arabs; she was neither child nor woman to them; she was but the soldier who had brought up the French reserve at Zaraila; she was but the foe who had seen them defeated, and ridden down with her comrades in their pursuit in twice a score of vanquished, bitter, intolerably shameful days. Some among them had sworn by their God to put her to a fearful death if ever they made her captive, for they held her in superstitious awe, and thought the spell of the Frankish successes would be broken if she were slain. She knew that; yet, knowing it, she looked at their advancing band one moment, then turned her horse's head and rode straight toward them.
“They will kill me, but that may save him,” she thought. “Any other way he is lost.”
So she rode directly toward them; rode so that she crossed their front, and placed herself in their path, standing quite still, with the cloth torn from the lantern, so that its light fell full about her, as she held it above her head. In an instant they knew her. They were the remnant who had escaped from the carnage of Zaraila; they knew her with all the rapid, unerring surety of hate. They gave the shrill, wild war-shout of their tribe, and the whole mass of gaunt, dark, mounted figures with their weapons whirling round their heads inclosed her; a cloud of kites settled down with their black wings and cruel beaks upon one young silvery-plumed falcon.
She sat unmoved, and looked up at the naked blades that flashed above her; there was no fear upon her face, only a calm, resolute, proud beauty—very pale, very still in the light that gleamed on it from the lantern rays.