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, and fiery
eyes, looked like an eagle of his own mountains. But another was soon to
cope with him, and that other the man who had been dear to her heart.

She had often compared him to a lion, but never had he seemed more akin
to the king of the wilderness.

Both were mighty and terrible men. No one could have predicted which
would be the victor and which the vanquished; but she was permitted to
watch their conflict, and already the hot-blooded son of the desert had
raised his war-cry and rushed upon the more prudent Hebrew.

Every child knows that life cannot continue if the heart ceases to throb
for a minute; yet Miriam felt that her own stood still as if benumbed
and turned to stone