ghting fury" was upon him; and when once this
had been lit in him, the Arabs knew of old that the fiercest vulture in
the Frankish ranks never struck so surely home as his hand.

As he spurred his horse down on them now, twenty blades glittered
against him; the foremost would have cut straight down through the bone
of his bared chest and killed him at a single lunge, but as its steel
flashed in the sun, one of his troopers threw himself against it, and
parried the stroke from him by sheathing it in his own breast. The blow
was mortal; and the one who had saved him reeled down off his saddle
under the hoofs of the trampling chargers. "Picpon s'en souvient," he
murmured with a smile; and as the charge swept onward, Cecil, with a
great cry of horror, saw the feet of the maddened horses strike to pulp
the writhing body, and saw the black, wistful eyes of the Enfant de
Paris look upward to him once, with love, and fealty, and unspeakable
sweetness gleaming through their darkened sight.

But to pause was impossible. Though the French horses were forced with
marvelous dexterity through a bristling forest of steel, though the
remnant of the once-glittering squadron was cast against them in as
headlong a daring as if it had half the regiments of the Empire at its
back, the charge availed little against the hosts of the desert that had
rallied and swooped down afresh almost as soon as they had been, for the
instant of the shock, panic-stricken. The hatred of the opposed races
was aroused in all its blind, ravening passion; the conquered had
the conquering nation for once at their mercy; for once at tremendous
disadvantage; on neither side was there aught except that one instinct
for slaughter, which, once awakened, kills every other in the breast in
which it burns.

The Arabs had cruel years to avenge--years of a loathed tyranny, years
of starvation and oppression, years of constant flight southward, with
no choice but submission or death. They had deadly memories to wash
out--memories of brethren who had been killed like carrion by the
invaders' shot and steel; of nomadic freedom begrudged and crushed by
civilization; of young children murdered in the darkness of the caverns,
with the sulphurous smoke choking the innocent throats that had only
breathed the golden air of a few summers; of women, well beloved, torn
from them in the hot flames of burning tents and outraged before
their eyes with insult whose end was a bayonet-thr