"I must ride over to Abdallah when Norman goes. It's all so hopeless!"

"Things will take a turn," rejoined Dicky, with a forced gaiety. "You
needn't ride over to Abdallah. I'll go with Norman, and what's more I'll
come back here with Mustapha Kali."

"You'll go to the Mudir?" asked Fielding eagerly. He seemed to set so
much store by this particular business.

"I'll bring the Mudir too, if there's any trouble," said Dicky grimly;
though it is possible he did not mean what he said.

Two hours later Fielding, Dicky, and Norman were in conference, extending
their plans of campaign. Fielding and Norman were eager and nervous, and
their hands and faces seemed to have taken on the arid nature of the
desert. Before they sat down Dicky had put the bottle of whiskey out of
easy reach; for Fielding, under ordinary circumstances the most
abstemious of men, had lately, in his great fatigue and overstrain,
unconsciously emptied his glass more often than was wise for a campaign
of long endurance. Dicky noticed now, as they sat round the table, that
Norman's hand went to the coffee-pot as Fielding's had gone to his glass.
What struck him as odd also was that Fielding seemed to have caught
something of Norman's manner. There was the same fever in the eyes,
though Norman's face was more worn and the eyes more sunken. He looked
like a man that was haunted. There was, too, a certain air of
helplessness about him, a primitive intensity almost painful. Dicky saw
Fielding respond to this in a curious way--it was the kind of fever that
passes quickly from brain to brain when there is not sound bodily health
commanded by a cool intelligence to insulate it. Fielding had done the