The Colonel shook his companions and whispered to them what was in the wind.  Belmont and Fardet were ready for any risk.  Stephens, to whom the prospect of a passive death presented little terror, was seized with a convulsion of fear when he thought of any active exertion to avoid it, and shivered in all his long, thin limbs.  Then he pulled out his Baedeker and began to write his will upon the flyleaf, but his hand twitched so that he was hardly legible.  By some strange gymnastic of the legal mind a death, even by violence, if accepted quietly, had a place in the order of things, while a death which overtook one galloping frantically over a desert was wholly irregular and discomposing.  It was not dissolution which he feared, but the humiliation and agony of a fruitless struggle against it.

Colonel Cochrane and Tippy Tilly had crept together under the shadow of the great acacia tree to the spot where the women were lying.  Sadie and her aunt lay with their arms round each other, the girl’s head pillowed upon the old woman’s bosom.  Mrs. Belmont was awake, and entered into the scheme in an instant.

“But you must leave me,” said Miss Adams earnestly.  “What does it matter at my age, anyhow?”

“No, no, Aunt Eliza; I won’t move without you!  Don’t you think it!” cried the girl.  “You’ve got to come straight away or else we both stay right here where we are.”

“Come, come, ma’am, there is no time for arguing, or nonsense,” said the Colonel roughly.  “Our lives all depend upon your making an effort, and we cannot possibly leave you behind.”

“But I will fall off.”

“I’ll tie you on with my puggaree.  I wish I had the cummerbund which I lent poor Stuart.  Now, Tippy, I think we might make a break for it!”

But the black soldier had been staring with a disconsolate face out over the desert, and he turned upon his heel with an oath.

“There!” said he sullenly.  “You see what comes of all your foolish talking!  You have ruined our chances as well as your own!”

Half-a-dozen mounted camel-men had appeared suddenly over the lip of the bowl-shaped hollow, standing out hard and clear against the evening sky where the copper basin met its great blue lid.  They were travelling fast, and waved their rifles as they came.  An instant later the bugle sounded an alarm, and the camp was up with a buzz like an overturned bee-hive.  The Colonel ran back to his companions, and the black soldier to his camel.  Stephens looked relieved, and Belmont sulky, while Monsieur Fardet raved, with his one uninjured hand in the air.

“Sacred name of a dog!” he cried.  “Is there no end to it, then?  Are we never to come out of the hands of these accursed Dervishes?”

“Oh, they really are Dervishes, are they?” said the Colonel in an acid voice.  “You seem to be altering your opinions.  I thought they were an invention of the British Government.”