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“Now, this is good!” said Derrick, and he was in the act of firing his revolver into the thick of the crowd below him when again the sinewy hand of his unknown friend checked him.

“Hold your fire, man!” the man said, in his quiet, unmoved voice. “You will want it presently.”

But the stranger’s hold tightened. He was standing in the shadow slightly behind Derrick.

“Wait!” he said. “They will find you soon enough. You are not in a position to take the offensive.”

Derrick swung round with a restless word. And then he pulled up short. He was facing a tribesman, gaunt and tall, with odd, light eyes that glittered strangely in the moonlight. Derrick stared at the apparition, dumbfounded. After a pause the man took his hand from the correspondent’s arm.

“Don’t give the show away for want of a little caution!” he said. “There are your men to think of, remember. This is no picnic.”

Derrick was still staring hard at the strange figure before him.

“I say,” he said at length, “what in the name of wonder are you?”

He heard a faint, contemptuous laugh. The unknown drew the end of his chuddah farther across his face.

“You are marvellously guileless for a war correspondent,” he said. And he turned on his heel and stalked away into the shadows.

Derrick stood gazing after him in stupefaction.

“A Secret Service agent, is he?” he murmured at length to himself. “By Jove! What a marvellous fake! On Carlyon’s business, I suppose. Confound Carlyon! I’ll tell him what I think of him if I come through this all right.”

Carlyon, in times of peace, was one of Derrick Rose’s most intimate friends. That Carlyon, upon whom he relied as upon a tower of strength should fail him at such a pinch as this, and for motives of caution alone, was a circumstance so preposterous and unheard-of that Derrick’s credulity was hardly equal to the strain.

He began to wonder if this stranger who had guided him into safety, from what he now realized to be a positive death-trap, had given him a wholly unexaggerated account of Carlyon’s attitude.

He waited awhile, thinking the matter over with rising indignation; and at length, as the noise below him subsided, he moved from his shelter to find his informant. It was a rash thing to do, but prudence was not his strong point. Moreover, the Secret Service man had aroused his curiosity. He wanted to see more of this fellow. So, with an indifference to danger, foolhardy, though too genuine to be contemptible, he strolled across an unprotected space of moonlight to join him.

Two seconds later he was lying on his face, struggling with the futile, convulsive effort of a stricken man to recover his footing. And even while he struggled, he lost consciousness.

He awoke at length as one awakes from a troublous dream, and looked about him with a dazed consciousness of great tumult.

The space in which he lay was no longer wide and empty. The white world was peopled with demons that leapt and surged around his prostrate body. And someone, a man in white, with naked, uplifted arms, stood above him and quelled the tumult.

Derrick saw it all, heard the mad yells lessen and die down, watched with a dumb amazement the melting away of the fierce crowd.

And then the man who stood over him turned suddenly and, kneeling, lifted him from his prostrate position. It was a man in native dress whose eyes held for Derrick an odd, half-familiar fascination.

Where had he met those eyes before? Ah, he remembered. It was the Secret Service man. And that was strange, too. For Carlyon always scoffed at Secret Service men. Still, this was a small matter which, no doubt, would right itself. Everything looked a little peculiar and distorted on this night of wonders. Carlyon himself had sadly degenerated in his opinion since the morning. Bother Carlyon!

Suddenly a great sigh burst from Derrick, and the moonlight broke up into tiny, dazzling fragments. The darkness was full of them, alive with them.