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Rh the Ottoman empire. A second more, and his hand would have been at the throat of this man: he would have hurled under his feet the dainty silken beauty of the coward who was thief and murderer in one, and would have crushed the truth from his throat and the craven life from his limbs under the iron grind of his heel, giving back vengeance as great as his wrongs. A second more, and the traitor who had laughed with him in good fellowship in the Parisian café, and butchered him in cold blood in the Danubian solitudes, would have answered to him for that work. Now, the Barbary mare lay riderless at his feet, and before him, around him, stretching dim in the distance, were thickets of myrtle, labyrinths of cactus, dense groups of oleander, of palm, of pomegranate, where his quarry had headed for a known covert, or had found one by chance, and from which it was as hopeless to draw him again as to unearth a fox once outran the hounds' scent, or pursue a stag that had once swam the loch. A curse broke, again from Erceldoune's lips, that the distant wail of the Imaum seemed to mock, and fling back, as he rode the Monarch headlong down into the wilderness of shrubs and flowers, trampling the boughs asunder,