A Son of the Sahara Part 65

For the horse halted and she fell off, flat on the soft sand.

Shaken, but not hurt, she sat up and gazed around.

A little oasis had been reached, where date palms stood black against the all-prevailing silver, and a tiny spring bubbled with cheerful whisper.

When the Sultan took his namesake out for exercise, this was the extreme limit of their ride--the horse had been there once already that day--and in the shade of the date palms the man and the horse would rest awhile before returning to the city.

But Pansy knew none of these things. She only knew that valuable time was being lost sitting there on the ground. But it was such an effort to get up.

Green eyes had seen her fall as if dead. The hyenas crept stealthily forward to feast upon what lay helpless in the sand. But when she sat up they retreated, to squat on their haunches at a safe distance, and fill the night with demoniacal laughter.

The sound brought Pansy to her feet, swaying with fatigue. She had heard it before, around her father's camp in Gambia.

But it was one thing to hear the hyenas when there were thirty or more people between herself and them, and another now that she was quite alone in the desert, with no one to come to her aid.

The chorus of mad, mocking mirth brought fear clutching at her, a fear that the horse's wild snorts increased. She looked round sharply to find there were at least a dozen of the brutes on her trail.

It was not Pansy's nature to show fear, even though she felt it.

Going to the spring, she picked up several large stones, and threw them at the hyenas.

A note of fear crept into their hideous voices. They beat a swift retreat, melting away into distance. There was too much life left in the girl and horse for them to attack as yet.

Gathering her tired self together Pansy looked round for a rock high enough to enable her to mount by. As it happened there was none handy.

Taking her horse by the mane, she led him from the oasis. Somewhat protestingly he went.

Pansy had to stagger on for nearly a mile on foot, in the deep, fatiguing sand, before she could find a tussock high enough to mount by.

Once on, she left the route to her horse.

To the uninitiated, one portion of the desert looks very similar to another. And the girl had no idea that the horse was retracing his steps, making his way slowly and laboriously back to El-Ammeh.

She had not the strength left even to look around her. The hot night, the long ride, the sickly excitement attached to escaping, the thirst that now raged within her, and the final tiring walk, after months of inactivity, had told upon her. Utterly worn out, she just managed to keep her seat, in a world that had become a place of aching weariness, through which there rang occasional wild shrieks of laughter.

Then it became impossible to cling on any longer.

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 h.e.l.l 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.

CHAPTER XXIX

The sound of that desperate conflict rang through the stillness of the night, reaching the ears of a man who was riding at break-neck speed along the sandy track leading in the direction of the oasis. Those diabolical shrieks of laughter filled him with a torture of mind almost past bearing. In them he heard the voices of hyenas mangling the girl he loved.

Le Breton had always known Pansy would run away if an opportunity occurred. But he had imagined that he had made escape impossible.

After dinner, he went to the gilded room, to pay an evening visit to his prisoner, since business affairs had kept him from dining with her.

However, she was not there.

Experience had taught him that it would be no use looking for her in the moonlit, rose-scented garden. She never went there after sunset, for fear he should come across her, and the beauty and romance of it all, combined with his presence, should force the surrender he was waiting for.

Not finding Pansy in her own private quarters, he went into the big hall of the harem, only to be told she had not been there since well before dinner.

On learning this he set the women searching in every corner of the harem. But Pansy was nowhere to be found.

Beyond a doubt, she had managed to escape. For a moment the news dazed him. He did not waste time in trying to discover how she had escaped, or who was responsible for her getting away. She had gone. That one fact glared at him. No one knew better than the Sultan himself the dangers awaiting the girl once she strayed beyond his care.

Within a few minutes all his servants and soldiers were out looking for the fugitive, scouring the city, with threats of the dire fate awaiting anyone who dared either hide or injure the Sultan's wife.

A hasty search brought no trace of the girl, but one of the search parties learnt that a horse was missing from the royal stables.

On hearing this the Sultan went at once to the stables, looking for a clue there. The missing horse was Pansy's. The discovery sent a sudden glow of hope coursing through him. It argued that somehow or other she had managed to reach the stables and had set out into the desert.

The Sultan understood horses, even better, it seemed to him now, than he understood women. Left to its own devices the old horse would go the way it knew the best; the way he generally took it. And left to itself it was almost certain to be, since its rider had no knowledge of any of the sandy tracks that lay around the city.

Within a few moments he was on the swiftest of his own horses, riding with all speed towards the oasis; but not before leaving orders with his officers to scour the desert in every direction.

He had ridden perhaps five miles when into the stealthy hiss of the sand another sound came. At first so far away that it was but a distant moan in the night. As he tore on rapidly it grew louder, developing into a chorus of hideous laughter, the cry of hyenas howling round their prey.

Desert reared, instinctively he knew there must be at least twenty of them.

When, above the melee he heard the terrorized screams of a horse, a deadly fear clutched him. Where the horse was, the girl was. And the sound told him the two had been attacked.

Around Pansy the ghastly conflict was raging. Around her mangled corpse, perhaps.

He suffered all the tortures of the d.a.m.ned, as with spur and crop he urged the great stallion onwards, until the animal was a lather of sweat and foam.

The hyenas heard the throb of those approaching hoofs, and fear gripped their cowardly hearts.