to the gates, lifted down the great bars, pulled the heavy bolts, turned the great key, and dragged them open--just as the mule-squadron arrived and my good Sergeant-Major was giving them the signal to join the assault!
It was not that I had suddenly remembered that the time I had allowed him must be up, but that I needed to see a human being again, to hear a human voice, after a quarter of an hour in that House of Death, that sinister abode of tragic mysteries. I felt an urgent and unconquerable yearning for some . . ."
"Breakfast," said George Lawrence, as the train slowed down.
§6.
Bathed, full-fed, and at peace with a noisy world, in so far as choking dust, grilling heat, and the weariness of three days' close confinement in a stuffy carriage allowed, the two compagnons de voyage lay and smoked the cheroot of digestion in a brief silence. Brief, because it was not in the power of the impulsive and eloquent beau sabreur, of the Spahis, to keep silence for long upon the subject uppermost in his active and ardent mind.
"Georges, mon vieux," he broke silence, "do you believe in spirits, ghosts, devils?"
"I firmly believe in whiskey, the ghost of a salary, and a devil of a thin time. Seen 'em myself," was the reply.
"Because the only solution that my Sergeant-Major could offer was just that. . . .
'Spirits! Ghosts! Devils!' he whispered, when he realised that the sous-officier had been murdered apparently by a corpse, and that the trumpeter had absolutely vanished into thin air, leaving not a trace of himself, and effecting the evaporation of his rifle as well as of his trumpet and everything else.
This was not very helpful, strongly as I was tempted to endorse it.
'Sergeant-Major Dufour,' said I, 'I am going to propound theories and you are going to find the weak points in them. The absurdities and idiocies in them.
Post vedettes far out, all round the place, and let the men fall out and water their beasts in the oasis. Sergeant Lebaudy will be in command. Tell him that fires may be lighted and soupe made, but that in an hour's time all are to be on grave-digging fatigue. He is to report immediately when mule-scouts from Lieutenant St. André's advance Senegalese arrive from Tokotu, or if anything happens meanwhile. If a vedette gives the alarm, all are to enter the fort immediately--otherwise no one is to set foot inside. Put a sentry at the gate. . . . You and I will look into this affaire while Achmet makes us some coffee'--and I gave the good fellow a cake of chocolate and a measure of cognac from my flask. We were both glad of that cognac.
While he was gone on this business I remained on the roof. I preferred the sunlight while I was alone. I freely admit it. I do not object to Arabs, but I dislike 'spirits, ghosts, and devils'--that commit murders and abductions. Perhaps I was not quite myself. But what would you? I had been enjoying fever; I had ridden all night; I was perilously near cafard myself; and the presence of those dead Watchers to whom I had spoken, the finding of that incredibly murdered man, the not finding of that more incredibly vanished trumpeter--had shaken me a little.
As I awaited the return of the Sergeant-Major I gazed at the corpse of the sous-officier. I stared and stared at the face of the dead man--not too pleasant a sight, George--contorted with rage, and pain, and hate--dead for some hours and it was getting hot on that roof--and there were flies . . . flies. . . .
I stared, I say, as though I would drag the truth from him, compel the secret of this mystery from his dead lips, hypnotise those dead eyes to turn to mine and--but no, it was he that hypnotised and compelled, until I was fain to look away.
As I did so, I noticed the man who was lying near. Yes, undoubtedly someone had carefully and reverently laid him out. His eyes had been closed, his head propped up on a pouch, and his hands folded upon his chest. Why had he received such different treatment from that meted out to the others? . . .
And then that bareheaded man. It was he--a very handsome fellow too--who had given me my first shock and brought it home to my wondering mind that the men who watched me were all dead.
You see, all but he had their faces in the deep shade of the big peaks of their képis--whilst he, bareheaded and shot through the centre of the forehead, was dead obviously--even to shortsighted me, looking up from below against the strong sunlight; even to me, deceived at first by his lifelike attitude.
And, as I glanced at their two képis lying there, I noticed something peculiar.
One had been wrenched and torn from within. The lining, newly ripped, was protruding, and the inner leather band was turned down and outward. It was as though something had recently been torn violently out of the cap--something concealed in the lining perhaps? . . .
No, it was not the freak of a ricochetting bullet. The standing man had been hit just above the nose and under the cap, the recumbent man was hit in the chest.
'Now what is this?' thought I. 'A man shot through the brain does not remove his cap and tear the lining out. He gives a galvanic start, possibly spins round, and quietly he falls backwards. His limbs stretch once and quiver, and he is still for ever. His tight-fitting cap may, or may not, fall off as he goes down--but there is no tearing out of the lining, no turning down of the leather band.'
Bullets play funny tricks, I know, but not upon things they do not touch. This bullet had been fired, I should say, from a palm tree, and almost on a level with the roof; anyhow, it had entered the head below the cap. There was no hole in that whatsoever. To which of these two men did the cap belong? . . .
Had all been normal in that terrible place, all lying dead as they had fallen, I might never have noticed this torn cap. As it was--where everything was extraordinary, and the mind of the beholder filled with suspicion and a thousand questions, it was most interesting and remarkable. It became portentous. It was one more phenomenon in that focus of phenomena!
And from that cap and its recently torn and still protruding lining--oh yes, most obviously torn quite recently, with its edging of unsoiled threads, frayed but clean--from that cap, I looked quite instinctively at the paper crushed in the left hand of the dead officer. I know not why I connected these two things in my mind. They connected themselves perhaps--and I was about to take the paper from the rigid fist, when I thought, 'No! Everything shall be done in order and with correctness. I will touch nothing, do nothing, until the Sergeant-Major returns and I have a witness.'
If I was to be procureur, juge d'instruction, judge and jury, coroner, and perhaps, avenger--everything should be done in due form--and my report upon the impossible affair be of some value, too.
But without touching the paper, I could see, and I saw with surprise--though the bon Dieu knows I had not much capacity for surprise left in my stunned mind--that the writing was in English!
Why should that be added to my conundrums? . . . A paper with English writing on it, in the hand of a dead French officer in a block-house in the heart of the Territoire Militaire of the Sahara!"
"Perhaps the bloke was English," suggested Lawrence. "I have heard that there are some in the Legion."
"No," was the immediate reply. "That he most certainly was not. A typical Frenchman of the Midi--a stoutish, florid, blue-jowled fellow of full habit. Perhaps a Provençal--thousands like him in Marseilles, Arles, Nimes, Avignon, Carcassonne, Tarascon. Might have been the good Tartarin himself. Conceivably a Belgian; possibly a Spaniard or Italian, but most certainly not an Englishman. . . . Still less was the standing man, an olive-cheeked
