Her women crossed their arms on their breasts and bowed before the Emir's wife, their golden bangles jingling. She drew Sallie down on the couch beside her and waved them away. They backed into another corner with heads still bent, but stealing furtive glances at the fair stranger. Sallie had let her veil fall; the heat was stifling.
The Emir's wife laid a hand on her heart and panted, as if she had been running. A hectic flush had coloured her sunken cheeks. Sallie saw that she must once have been a very good-looking girl.
"How did you come to our camp?" she asked, suppressing with a great effort the cough her labouring chest could scarcely contain. "Is there another caravan near, or—a ship?"
"A ship," Sallie answered gently, forgetting all her own urgent troubles in quick compassion for that poor soul. And the dying girl's feverish eyes grew suddenly eager.
"A ship!" she repeated breathlessly, and for a moment or two seemed to be searching Sallie's expressively pitiful features for some further information, which she found there. The anxiety in her eyes changed to appeal, and then certainty.
"You'll help—me," she whispered. "I know you will." And she began to cough.
Two or three of her women came running forward to offer her such first aid as lay in their power. Another had hurried off through a curtained doorway which led inward, and promptly returned, followed by two enormous negroes, vile-looking rascals, each wearing a scanty tunic of leopard-skins which hung from one shoulder and did not reach to his knees, with a broad waist-belt which also served to contain a short, heavy scimitar, in a metal scabbard. Between them walked a man, a white man to judge by his hands, since his head was completely masked in a hood of coarse scarlet cotton, with only a couple of careless eyelet-holes and a rough round mouth cut in it. He was dressed in a worn drill tunic and riding-breeches and pigskin puttees, and carried himself, a thin, limber, muscular figure, with careless ease.
Sallie took him to be that doctor of whom the Emir had spoken, and shuddered at thought of the dreadful death with which the Emir had threatened him. His guards' cruel faces grew still more watchful and grim as he hastened, limping a little, toward the couch, while they were still saluting its occupant.
Sallie had risen from it and was standing with one arm about the other girl's heaving shoulders, adjusting her veil. The cough had ceased again, but its victim had not yet recovered her voice. The man in the mask glanced most unhappily at her and then at Sallie. But it was not concern on his own account that his steady grey eyes expressed.
He was about to speak, when the Emir's wife held up a thin, transparent hand. "Wait," she begged weakly. "There is so little time—and my strength—"