the tribe of
Judah, Naashon, and Uri the son of Hur, who had distinguished himself by
courage and discretion and hastened, with other picked men, to his
father's relief.

He had not lost a moment, yet the conflict was decided when he appeared
on the scene of action; for when he approached the camp the Amalekites
had already broken through his father's troops, cut it off from them, and
rushed in.

Joshua first saved the brave old man from the foe; then the next thing
was to drive the sons of the desert from the tents and, in so doing,
there was a fierce hand to hand struggle of man against man, and as he
himself could be in only one place he was forced to leave the young men
to shift for themselves.

Here, too, he raised the war-cry: "Jehovah our standard!" and rushed upon
the tent of Hur,--which the enemy had seized first and where the battle
raged most fiercely.

Many, corpses already strewed the ground at its entrance, and furious
Amalekites were still struggling with a band of Hebrews; but wild shrieks
of terror rang from within its walls.

Joshua dashed across the threshold as if his feet were winged and beheld
a scene which filled even the fearless man with horror; for at the left
of the spacious floor Hebrews and Amalekites rolled fighting on the
blood-stained mats, while at the right he saw Miriam and several of her
women whose hands had been bound by the foe.

The men had desired to bear them away as a costly prize; but an Amalekite
woman, frantic with rage and jealousy and thirsting for revenge, wished
to devote the foreign women to a fiery death; fanning the embers upon the
hearth she had brought them, with the help of the veil torn from Miriam's
head, to a bright blaze.

A terrible uproar filled the spacious enclosure, when Joshua sprang into
the tent.

Here furious men were fighting, yonder the female servants of the
prophetess were shrieking loudly or, as they saw the approaching warrior,
screaming for help and rescue.

Their mistress, deadly pale, knelt before the hostile chief whose wife
had threatened her with death by fire. She gazed at her preserver as if
she beheld a ghost that had just risen from the earth and what now
happened remained imprinted on Miriam's memory as a series of bloody,
horrible, disconnected, yet superb visions.

In the first place the Amalekite chieftain who had bound her was a
strangely heroic figure.

The bronzed warrior, with his bold hooked nose, black beard, a