"_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.