To be apprehended as the slayer of
Mohammed Beyd would be equivalent to a sentence of immediate death.
The fierce and brutal raiders would tear to pieces a Christian who had
dared spill the blood of their leader. He must find some excuse to
delay the finding of Mohammed Beyd's dead body.

Returning his revolver to its holster, he walked quickly to the
entrance of the tent. Parting the flaps he stepped out and confronted
the men, who were rapidly approaching. Somehow he found within him the
necessary bravado to force a smile to his lips, as he held up his hand
to bar their farther progress.

"The woman resisted," he said, "and Mohammed Beyd was forced to shoot
her. She is not dead--only slightly wounded. You may go back to your
blankets. Mohammed Beyd and I will look after the prisoner;" then he
turned and re-entered the tent, and the raiders, satisfied by this
explanation, gladly returned to their broken slumbers.

As he again faced Jane Clayton, Werper found himself animated by quite
different intentions than those which had lured him from his blankets
but a few minutes before. The excitement of his encounter with
Mohammed Beyd, as well as the dangers which he now faced at the hands
of the raiders when morning must inevitably reveal the truth of what
had occurred in the tent of the prisoner that night, had naturally
cooled the hot passion which had dominated him when he entered the tent.

But another and stronger force was exerting itself in the girl's favor.
However low a man may sink, honor and chivalry, has he ever possessed
them, are never entirely eradicated from his character, and though
Albert Werper had long since ceased to evidence the slightest claim to
either the one or the other, the spontaneous acknowledgment of them
which the girl's speech had presumed had reawakened them both within
him.

For the first time he realized the almost hopeless and frightful
position of the fair captive, and the depths of ignominy to which he
had sunk, that had made it possible for him, a well-born, European
gentleman, to have entertained even for a moment the part that he had
taken in the ruin of her home, happiness, and herself.

Too much of baseness already lay at the threshold of his conscience for
him ever to hope entirely to redeem himself; but in the first, sudden
burst of contrition the man conceived an honest intention to undo, in
so far as lay within his power, the evil that his criminal avarice had
bro