to think of future or past! Better not to think at all,
perhaps, but do as some of the other men did when they wanted to forget
even as they had been forgotten: take the few pleasures in their reach,
do the very things he had been prig enough to warn Valdez not to do! Let
the beetle burrow, as a counter-irritant!

"Soldier St. George--my soldier!" a girl's voice seemed to encourage
him.

Max heard it through the scratching of the beetle in his brain.

Sanda! Yes, Sanda might care a little, a very little, when she had time
to think of him--Sanda, who loved another man, but had promised to be
his friend. He thought of her eyes as they had looked at him that day in
the Salle d'Honneur. He thought of her hair, her long, soft hair....

"She'd be sorry if I let go," he said to himself. "Jove! I _won't_! I'll
fight this down. And if I'm taken on the march----"

He fell suddenly asleep, thinking of Sanda's hair, her long, soft hair.

And the moonlight turned him also into a stone soldier on a tomb.

CHAPTER XVII

THE MISSION

It is the darkest hour that comes before the dawn. Next day Soldier St.
George became Corporal St. George, and felt more pleasure in the bit of
red wool on his sleeve than Lieutenant Max Doran would have thought
possible.

It was Four Eyes who brought him the news, a week later, that his name
was among those who would go on "the great march." Four Eyes was somehow
invariably the first one to hear everything, good news or bad. Life was
not so black after all. There need be no past for a Legionnaire, but
there might be a future. None of the men knew for certain when the start
was to be made, but it would be soon, and the barracks of the Legion
seethed with excitement. Even those who were not going could talk of
nothing else. They swore that there was no doubt of the business to be
done. The newly risen leader of the Senussi had summoned large bands of
the sect to the village, El Gadhari, of which he was sheikh, calling
upon them ostensibly to celebrate a certain feast. Close to this village
was one of the most important Senussi monasteries. Tribes were moving
all through the south, apparently with no warlike intention; but the
Deliverer was dangerous. Just such a leader as he--even to the gray eyes
and the horseshoe on his forehead--had been prophesied for this time of
the world. The Legion would march. And it would maneuver in the desert,
in the neighbourhood of El Gadhari. If the warning