"The wells of El Djebir, Monsieur," explained Sergeant Perinaud. "It is here we should find our men, if they are proceeding by the shortest route to their hills. If not—" He shrugged his shoulders significantly.

The horses were roused from their gentle amble into a gallop. The dust rose from fourscore hoofs as the Goumiers raced down in an enveloping cloud upon the cluster of palms and thicket of broom scrub which surrounded the watering-place. They pulled their horses upon their haunches; they shouted in hoarse disappointment. The shadowed resting-place beneath the palms was empty. Not a living soul was in sight.

Perinaud shrugged his shoulders again.

"This is very conclusive, Monsieur. The party we seek has thought fit to leave the open road and to bury themselves in the recesses of the jungle and the northern gorges of the river. They did not do that without a reason. It remains to follow, if we can."

The native officer shouted something and Perinaud turned swiftly in the saddle to stare down the track which they had been following. A white figure bestriding a brown horse was thundering towards them, the rider's haik fluttering out snowily against the dun background of the earth.

"So Monsieur thought fit to leave me—me!" expostulated Daoud, as he drew rein at Aylmer's side. "I, I who address you, am told by the chance gossip of the SÔk that this expedition has set out without a word of warning, to seek bandits—where?" He threw abroad his arms in derision. "On the broad and open road, within sound, nay, almost within sight, of the patrols of Casablanca. I ask, is it here that knaves are likely to hide their knavery? Your venture and its object are already the pivot on which the laughter of the market-place swings."

He turned and pointed vehemently towards the north.

"Has none of your trained spies had the wit or the courage to tell you that a hundred of these Beni M'Geel Berbers have encamped in the thickets of the Bou Gherba gorge this ten days back? And yet the market-place knows it, as it knows a hundred things beneath your concern."

Perinaud looked the Moor up and down. Then he turned leisurely towards Aylmer.

"He is a safe man, this?" he asked. "You guarantee him?"

Aylmer smiled, and shrugged his shoulders towards the waiting Goumiers.

"They are all for their own hand, these, are they not, Sergeant? Yes, I will guarantee that he seeks to serve me, for the moment, and in serving me, himself. It is the way with these desert folk. They cannot manage large issues, and they split into factions to follow small ones. Let us hear him and, if you see no objection, take his advice. He has been in Casablanca before."

Perinaud grunted and eyed the Moor grudgingly.

"Well, man of infinite knowledge," he said in Arabic. "You propose—what?"

"Are there two courses before us?" asked Daoud, disdainfully. "Or are we to await reinforcements? We have to surround this lair of desert cats."

"Where?" asked Perinaud, laconically.

The Moor wheeled his stallion with an elaborate caracole.

"If the Sidi had used my services from the first," he said, "he would have been saved an hour's ride. Forward, Sidi!"

The sergeant lifted his eyebrows at Aylmer with an air of comical resignation. To the native officer he gave a decisive little nod. With Daoud leading, the brown stallion arching his neck in remonstrance to a tightened rein and goading spur, the column broke formation and in single file turned northwards into the broom scrub which fringes the tilled lands of the Chawia.

The horsemen rode in silence. The mantle of Rattier's taciturnity, rent to rags in D'Hubert's office, seemed to have been restored to its pristine imperviousness, seemed, indeed, to hang heavy upon the spirits of the whole company. Now and again the commandant's lips moved uneasily, but the spoken word died still-born. A Goumier would address fervent maledictions to the memory of the female ancestors of a stumbling horse; curt conferences took place at long intervals between Perinaud and the native officer. But apart from this, the thud of hoofs meeting sand or earth and the dull rap of rein or stirrup leather were all the sounds which broke the stillness. The heavy noontide heat seemed to have swallowed into silence all sound. For sound denotes creative energy, and energy, when the sun is at its zenith in South Morocco, is sapped.

Their course, as Aylmer was quick to notice, led perpetually upward, but in gradients which almost eluded notice. Gray blue in the haze of distance, the rolling uplands culminated in a range of low hills, but these were a full day's march beyond their powers. Their goal, if it were to be reached within daylight, must be nearer than that. His attention, as the hours went monotonously by, was at last drawn to a gap in the far mapped expanse of vegetation.

A line of green, deeper and of more luxuriant growth than the thickets around them, divided the jungle from east to west. Daoud, turning in his saddle, waved his hand in an important gesture.

"The Gorge of the Bou Djerba, Sidi," he said. "It is my advice that I go forward to reconnoitre—alone."

Aylmer looked at Perinaud. The sergeant shrugged his shoulders.

"Monsieur guarantees this fellow, I understand? Well, let him justify himself. I have no objections."

Rattier interrupted.

"It is well understood that I deal with this M. de Landon if he is there, I alone? Your man, now, if he suddenly confronts him—" He broke off with a meaning gesture. "I do not wish my interview with him anticipated."

In spite of himself, a smile broke the imperturbability of the sergeant's face. With a suggestive jerk of the hand he dismissed Daoud, who cantered on into and was lost in the jungle of mallow. Perinaud turned sympathetic and now perfectly grave features towards the commandant.

"Monsieur may be easy in his mind," he said quietly. "The man we seek, if I have understood his talents rightly, is hardly likely to be subdued without the display of some force and intelligence."

He turned to give the order to dismount. Rattier watched him with an air of baffled exasperation. There had been a gentle emphasis on the last two words which could scarcely be misunderstood, and as the sailor ruminated over them, his taciturnity showed renewed signs of failing before the rising tide of his wrath. A sudden diversion averted an outbreak.

For a gunshot rang out among the woodland silences into which Daoud had disappeared. It was instantly replied to by the shriller snap of a revolver. And this was followed by a fusillade of five more reports as the weapon was emptied. The Moor's voice was suddenly uplifted.

"To me, Sidi!" he was shouting vehemently. "To me!"

The native officer thundered an order. In a twinkling the men were back in their saddles and, in irregular formation, threading the aisles of thicket at a canter. Aylmer and Rattier followed the sergeant, riding abreast.

There came another report. A bullet whistled between the pair, and from Rattier came a little growl of satisfaction. If there was to be a fight, he seemed to imply, his promised interview with Landon would assume proportions which were entirely pleasing to him. Perinaud increased his horse's pace, flinging alert glances each side of him rather than in front.

A couple of hundred yards at speed and the forest maze opened into a wide clearing, deeply overgrown with mallow and broom. Through the middle of this, his horse laboring against the growth which was full five feet high, rode Daoud, revolver in hand. A short distance ahead of him the green thicket was grooved in half a dozen places, as unseen bodies crashed through. Daoud's aim was poised and then withdrawn a score of times in as many seconds. The flicker of a white haik would show for a brief instant here and there, and then be swallowed by the jungle.

Daoud would answer these appearances with a bullet, one which apparently invariably missed its mark, for the echo of a mocking triumph greeted them. He turned irritably in the direction of his companions.

He waved his hand significantly, motioning them to deploy right and left, to surround the thicket. Perinaud answered with a comprehending nod.

But Rattier had neither the time nor the inclination for a display of tactics. As Daoud turned his horse to emerge from the mallow, the commandant spurred his charger into the thick of it. And he shouted, he whirled up his right hand, grasping his revolver, with fierce gesticulations of encouragement.

The Goumiers saw, heard, and found little room for hesitation in their mood. Like a torrent released at the breaking of a dam, they followed. Perinaud thundered an ineffectual protest.

It fell on deaf ears. The green brake was furrowed by a dozen lanes before their impact and then, relentlessly, as it seemed, closed behind them. The horses bucked, plunged, but made little headway. From one of them came a sudden whinnying shriek of pain.

Then it sank under its rider as the knife which had severed its tendons slipped back into the cover from which it had been so swiftly and so silently thrust.

The fallen Goumier cleared himself and scrambled to his feet. His face alone was clear in the sea of vegetation, and it was a mask of anger and bewilderment. And then it, too, was gone with a sudden panting cry.

Aylmer gave a little gasp. The head was there and then it was not. It sank into the green as the swimmer sinks into the blue in a shark-infested sea. But this shark was a human one, and its teeth a long Berber knife. The fugitives of the Beni M'Geel had chosen their battle-ground well.

Horse or man, lance or carbine—what were they against the daggers which the tussocks veiled? Mocking cries echoed in the thicket. Another horse shrieked and fell; another face showed white above the green and then was gone. The Goumiers snarled with rage as they spurred furiously forward, but the clinging mallow held them, shackled them, suffocated them with its density. There was a note of panic in their shouts; they battled no longer for victory but for escape.

The leader of the reckless charge was in slightly better case than the majority. Rattier and one or two others, by chance of circumstances, stood in wider spaces, where the dagger men could not reach them unseen. They sat in their saddles, alert for opportunity, quivering with rage, but useless. Their glances flashed from side to side, their eyes gleamed, but opportunity evaded them. And the cries of the unseen enemy still mocked them from the ambush.

Carried away by impulse, Aylmer would have joined the charge. Perinaud's hand fell upon his reins with a grip of iron. Aylmer made as if he would release them by force.

The sergeant made a gesture of appeal.

"No, my Captain! This is serious. A little coolness, a little restraint, and we pull them out of this! But to follow! That spells death for us all!"

He leaped from the saddle, drew his carbine from the bucket, and flung to Aylmer the reins of both horses.

"If Monsieur will be so obliging?" he said quickly, and turned towards the nearest tree, a cedar which towered twenty feet above the dwarfed bolls of cork. He climbed lithely, rapidly, resting, at last, within a few feet of the top. He leaned his carbine upon a bough, took a steady aim, and fired.

A shriek answered the report—a shriek muffled in the blanket of the broom.

"Courage, mes enfants!" said Perinaud, placidly. "That accounted for one, and from here I see all. There are but six. Give me time and the affair completes itself effectually."

Again he dwelled upon his aim, hesitated, fired, shook his head in self-reproach and fired again. This time he gave a little nod of satisfaction.

"Two!" he cried complacently. "Two, my children!" and the report of his rifle punctuated the announcement. "So!" went on the sergeant, as if he commented on the score at a rifle range. "So! We write full stop to Monsieur le troisiÈme. Aha! Messieurs quatriÈme, cinquiÈme and sixiÈme—it is poor stuff to push through, the broom. No, I do not see you, Messieurs, but I see where you run like rabbits, and perhaps we may chance a bullet—there!"

The report of the last cartridge in the magazine was answered by another yell. A brown-clad body shot into the air out of the undergrowth and subsided limply. Perinaud nodded again.

"Through the brain, my friend, through the brain. Yes, I still see you, my two little doves. We have to reload. Four for one magazine of five cartridges is not bad, you will allow. You are trapped, are you not? In the broom you cannot escape me; in the open you will be ridden down. Well, it is to be in the broom, is it? So! VoilÀ, Monsieur le cinquiÈme! That closes your account. As for you, my sixth friend, you have chosen the thicket, have you? You are very still; we must speculate, we must invite the co-operation of chance, who is a good friend to Sergeant Perinaud as a rule. There! No, is that not in the middle of the target? We must try again. Umph! I wonder if you are, after all, dead, my pigeon. HolÀ, there! Monsieur le Commandant. If you will be good enough to step fifteen long paces to the right, following the motion of my hand, you will be able to inform me if my last shot was a bull's-eye, an outer, or even—shame to me if it is so—a miss. Yes, Monsieur, that is the spot. Where the patch of broom outcrops between those two stumps of cork."

Rattier beat a road laboriously through the clinging stems as the sergeant's finger motioned. A sudden muffled exclamation burst from him; he lurched sideways, stumbled, and fell prone. The green stalks rustled and shook as something brown and indistinguishable shot through them in the direction in which the waiting Goumiers were thickest.

Perinaud gave a warning cry.

"Look to yourselves! I cannot shoot; he is in line between us!"

One of the horsemen shouted and spurred his stallion towards the fringe of the undergrowth furthest from the point at which the charge had entered it. His impulsive action countered Perinaud's manifest purpose of firing, for he, too, had seen the agitation of the mallow in that direction. The horseman bounded forward, the horse clearing the obstructions in a series of jerky little leaps. Beside the edge of the clearing they halted, the man searching the cover in front of him and on each side keenly.

A brown something snaked out of the thicket at his back. Steel flashed in the sun. The Goumier toppled from the saddle, and a brown figure, bowing flat across the horse's withers, seemed to have replaced him almost in the moment of his fall. Spurred desperately by his new rider, the stallion burst away down the cork tree alleys.

A ragged volley rattled out. Splinters flew wide from a dozen trees, but horse and rider fled on. The Goumiers called fiercely on the name of a dozen saints of Islam to qualify their rage as they thrust their chargers out of the tangle in pursuit. Perinaud and their officer yelled strenuous commands.

Crestfallen and sullen, the troopers reined in, listening in silence to the commination addressed to them from the pulpit of the cedar.

"Is one lesson insufficient?" thundered Perinaud. "Do we practise the arts of war or are we conducting a ralli-papier? Like hares you were decoyed into this ambush, and, flinging your red-hot experience to the winds, you are prepared to be drawn, as likely as not, into another. Collect yourselves, morally as well as physically, if you please."

They reined in among the cork trees, and half a dozen, flinging their reins to comrades, pushed back on foot into the cover. A string of oaths and maledictions, twice repeated, told of what they found. They came back with the sullen tread of those bearing the heavy burdens of defeat and death. They laid the bodies of their two comrades at the foot of the cedar.

Rattier, leaning upon Aylmer's arm, swore vehemently. The blood dripped from a gash across his wrist, but he raised it to shake a fist in the direction taken by the fugitive.

"Another item in M. de Landon's ledger, name of all names!" he cried. "But we shall see, my friends, we shall see. The hand is not played out yet, believe me!"

"Perhaps not," agreed Aylmer, "but you, at any rate, have cut out of the deal, or have been cut out," he added significantly, pointing to the wounded arm.

The commandant drew himself away with a fierce jerk.

"I!" he cried. "Is a cut finger—a graze—to send me weeping to the ambulance? The scoundrel who deceived me I pursue to the world's end! He has scored once more. It is the last time—this!"

He raised himself to his full height in a grandiloquent gesture and—fell fainting into Perinaud's arms. The sergeant grunted morosely and pointed to a crimson stain which had welled through the blue tunic and was rapidly spreading.

"If it is not serious, I thank Our Lady and all the listening Saints for this!" he said devoutly. "He is impossible as a colleague on reconnaissance, this energetic commandant. It was his recklessness which led these men into a trap which at any other moment they would have avoided. We have lost two men and five horses by the result of this escapade. What are your suggestions now, Monsieur?"

Aylmer hesitated.

"For the moment have you not done enough?" he asked. "After all, your service is to France, not to intruders like myself. My Moorish servant and I might continue to reconnoitre alone. Your hands are full enough, are they not?"

The other looked at him queerly.

"Perhaps Monsieur thinks that so far we have been a hindrance rather than a help to his purposes. Monsieur has reason. At the same time we might justly, in my opinion, be permitted another chance to repair our prestige."

Aylmer smiled. Perinaud's voice was chilly. The glance he directed at the crestfallen Goumiers let it be inferred that his words were also designed to reach their address. They shuffled and kicked at the ground restlessly as they listened.

"It is for you, of course, to direct matters, Sergeant!" he said quickly. "But the commandant, without a doubt, must be removed at once to hospital."

"Without a doubt, Monsieur," agreed Perinaud, with sudden cheerfulness. "We will escort him and the dismounted men out of the forest into the open farm lands, where patrols are not infrequent and nothing is to be feared. They will then be about twenty kilometres from the town. The best mounted will proceed as quickly as possible to fetch the ambulance. Of the others, twenty will escort the commandant's stretcher—it is perfectly feasible to make a good one of poles which we will cut and over which we will button two greatcoats—the five new-made fantassins will walk. The remaining dozen and you and I, Monsieur, will proceed—with energy, if you please, but certainly with prudence."

Perinaud closed his little homily with the satisfied air of an orator who has arrived at and correctly delivered an anticipated peroration.

And chance, who may have been listening, offered yet another of her favors to her protÉgÉ. As the little column debouched from the trees into the open expanse of alluvial country, a cloud of brown dust was rising on the far side of the fringing barley fields. Perinaud gave an exclamation of content.

"It is the Tirailleurs with their major," he explained. "They have patrolled the Ber Rechid road and made a reconnaissance to get cattle. They will have an ambulance, or at least a mule litter."

He put his horse to the gallop. The others, following more sedately, saw him reach and disappear among the ranks of white-uniformed men, whose cummerbunds and tarbooshes winked a cheerful scarlet against the dun fallow or green cropping of the fields. And there was an air of animation about the column accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that innumerable kids frisked about their mothers as the captured goats were herded along the track, while droves of small, wiry cattle bellowed and butted at each other, their captors, and every moving object within reach of their serviceable little horns.

Perinaud, who had dismounted, was standing and speaking with an air of respect and precision to a mounted officer. The latter turned as Aylmer and his companions approached, and the former could barely restrain a start of consternation and surprise. For a deep, flaming groove dinted the man's forehead from temple to temple, while the hand which he raised in salute was one huge scar from knuckles to wrist. His brown eyes inspected Aylmer with friendly attention.

"At your service, mon Capitaine," he said. "Sergeant Perinaud has explained your needs."

Aylmer began to express his thanks. The other nodded pleasantly and gave an order. From the rear an ambulance was trotted forward: a gray-moustached doctor in uniform swung himself from his saddle and bent over Rattier, who was still unconscious.

A moment later he looked up.

"Loss of blood," he said laconically. "He has a gash two fingers deep behind the shoulder. Severe, but not serious—with care. We will see to him."

The officer nodded again. He looked at Aylmer.

"And yourself, Monsieur?" he asked.

Aylmer made a gesture towards the forest and the distant uplands.

"With your leave, we will continue our—investigations, Major," he said.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

"The forest, mon ami? We, do you see, have confined our operations so far to the plough lands, the open. I have no store of experience to draw upon for your advice. You will be pioneers. I shall hope to have the benefit of your experience on your return. Maillot is my name, Monsieur, and I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you at the headquarters of my regiment outside the Fedallah Gate. For the moment, then, au revoir!"

He smiled cheerfully, saluted, and gave an order. The tramp and jingle of the march were renewed. The dust cloud began to form again where it had settled, and the Tirailleurs swung off seawards with the elastic step which those who wear the godillot acquire, and which makes them the envy of their colleagues in the regulars who are doomed to the precise lacing of the soulier. Perinaud made a gesture of admiration, as with Aylmer and his half score of Goumiers he watched them go.

"Monsieur has seen the bravest man and the finest leader of all the troops of France," he remarked.

"Major Maillot?"

"But certainly the major, Monsieur. He needs no medals to prove what he is and where he has been. His deeds are witnessed on his brow and hands."

He hesitated and then spoke quickly.

"I have no wish to vaunt the deeds of Frenchmen to you, a foreigner, Monsieur, but that is a man in whom we may take an honest pride. The scar you saw came to him by Settat. He and a picket were cut off from the main body by a hidden reserve of the enemy. They retreated fighting and were within measurable distance of safety. And then one of our fallen, whom they had left for dead, cried aloud out of the hands of the enemy. How these savages were dealing with him I shall not disgust Monsieur by telling. Suffice it to say that they were working the will of devils upon him and, in spite of his manhood, he shrieked. The major heard, and like a thunderbolt turned and charged straight for the enemy, and his men, without a thought of the peril, turned with him, a dozen perhaps, against five score. But those hundred Moors were in full retreat before the main body of the regiment raced up to the rescue, and they picked their major up wounded as you have seen, lying across the body of the man he had fought to save, with seven dead foes ringed round him.... They have a confident air, these Tirailleurs of ours. Some say an insolent one. Well, Monsieur, they have their pride, it must be allowed, but God knows when they are led as that man leads they have a right to it."

Aylmer nodded. Slowly they turned their horses' heads forestwards again. Perinaud looked at the line of trees abstractedly and then back again at the receding column.

"France does not desert her children if she remembers," he remarked quietly. "It is well that we met these men and their major. He is a man who will see to it that we are not forgotten, if chance wills that we do not soon return. The task of seeking us would be one after his own heart, and his Tirailleurs would think with him." He smiled confidently. "So we may go forward with an easy mind, mon Capitaine. We are pioneers, as the major said. To pioneers should come adventures, if they are worthy of their name."

He touched his stallion's flank with the spur. The little band of horsemen cantered up and into the shadow of the cork trees. And there was an air of arrogance and recklessness about the riders. All trace of discomfiture of an hour back was gone. It was as if the Tirailleurs had breathed an infection of valor around them—a bacillus of intrepidity which their major had cultivated with the point of his untiring sword.