and exhaustless--so they
were ready to hold the ground here, until of all their numbers there
should be left not one living man.

He glanced back on them, guarding his head the while from the lances
that were rained on him; and he lifted the guidon higher and higher,
till, out of the ruck and the throng, the brazen bird caught afresh the
rays of the rising sun.

Then, like arrows launched at once from a hundred bows, they charged;
he still slightly in advance of them, the bridle flung upon his horse's
neck, his head and breast bare, one hand striking aside with his blade
the steel shafts as they poured on him, the other holding high above the
press the Eagle of the Bonapartes.

The effort was superb.

Dense bodies of Arabs parted them in the front from the camp where the
battle raged, harassed them in the rear with flying shots and hurled
lances, and forced down on them on either side like the closing jaws of
a trap. The impetuosity of their onward movement was, for the moment,
irresistible; it bore headlong all before it; the desert horses
recoiled, and the desert riders themselves yielded--crushed, staggered,
trodden aside, struck aside, by the tremendous impetus with which the
Chasseurs were thrown upon them. For the moment the Bedouins gave way,
shaken and confused, as at the head of the French they saw this man,
with his hair blowing in the wind, and the sun on the fairness of his
face, ride down on them thus unharmed, though a dozen spears were aimed
at his naked breast; dealing strokes sure as death, right and left as
he went, with the light from the hot, blue skies on the ensign of France
that he bore.

They knew him; they had met him in many conflicts; and wherever the
"fair Frank," as they called him, came, there they knew of old the
battle was hard to win; bitter to the bitterest end, whether that end
were defeat, or victory costly as defeat in its achievement.

And for the moment they recoiled under the shock of that fiery
onslaught; for the moment they parted and wavered and oscillated beneath
the impetus with which he hurled his hundred Chasseurs on them, with
that light, swift, indescribable rapidity and resistlessness of attack
characteristic of the African Cavalry.

Though a score or more, one on another, had singled him out with
special and violent attack, he had gone, as yet, unwounded, save for a
lance-thrust in his shoulder, of which, in the heat of the conflict, he
was unconscious. The "fi