Up they stormed.  The Master’s voice cried, once more:  “Give ’em Hell!”

He was the first man to top the dune, close to the wady’s edge.  There he checked himself, revolver in mid-air, eyes wide with astonishment.  This way and that he peered, squinting with eyes that did not understand.

“Nom de Dieu!” ejaculated Leclair, at his side.

“Wallah!” shouted Rrisa, furiously.  “Oh, may Allah smite their faces!”

Each man, as he leaped to the rampart top, stood transfixed with astonishment.  Most of them cried out in their native tongues.

Their amazement was well-grounded.  Not an Arab was to be seen.  Of all those Beni Harb, none remained—­not even the one shot by the Master.  The sand on the dune was cupped with innumerable prints of feet in rude babooshes (native shoes), and empty cartridges lay all about.  But not one of the Ahl Bayt, or People of the Black Tents, was visible.

“Sure, now, can you beat that?” shouted Bohannan, exultantly, and waved his service cap.  “Licked at the start!  They quit cold!”

Sheffield, at his side, dropped to the sand, his heart drilled by a jagged slug.  The explosion of that shot crackled in from another line of dunes, off to eastward—­a brown, burnt ridge, parched by the tropic sun of ages.

Sweating with the heat and the exertion of the charge, amazed at having found—­in place of windrows of sleeping men—­an enemy still distant and still as formidable as ever, the Legionaries for a moment remained without thought or tactics.

Rrisa, livid with fury and baffled hate, flung up wild arms and began screaming the most extravagant insults at the still invisible nomads, whose fire was now beginning again all along their line.

“O rejected ones, and sons of the rejected!” the Arab howled.  “O hogs and brothers of hogs!” He fell to gnawing his own hand, as Arabs will in an excess of passion.  Once more he screamed:  “O Allah, deny not their skin and bones to the eternal flame!  O owls, oxen, beggars, cut-off ones!  Oh, give them the burning oil, Allah!  The cold faces!  Oh, wither their hands!  Make them kusah! (beardless).  Oh, these swine with black livers, gray eyes, beards of red.  Vilest that ever hammered tent-pegs, goats of El Akhfash!  O Beni Harb![1]”

[Footnote 1:  Beni Harb, or Sons of Battle, by a change in the aspiration of the “H,” becomes “Sons of Flight, or Cowardice.”]

The Master gripped his furious orderly, and pushed him back, down the slope.

“No more of that, Rrisa!” he commanded, fiercely.  “These be old woman’s ways, these screamings!  Silence, Bismillah!”

He hailed the others.

“They score, the first round!  Their game is to retreat, if they’re suspicious of any ruse or any attack from us.  They’re not going to stand and fight.  We can’t get near enough to them to throw the remaining lethal capsules over.  And we can’t chase them into the desert.  Their plan is to hold us here, and pick us off one by one—­wipe us out, without losing a man!