Page:Vance--Terence O'Rourke.djvu/97

 Chambret pursed his lips and shrugged his shoulders.

"I will join your army, monsieur," he volunteered presently, "and wear one of your pretty uniforms—and the revolver."

"Ye will be welcome," said O'Rourke simply, again assuming the glasses. After a second reassuring inspection he nevertheless called Danny and issued to him orders concerning the arms and ammunition of the troopers.

The Eirene plowed on toward the coast; gradually it loomed before her bows until its outlines were easily to be discerned with the unaided eye—a long, low border of shelving beach that was tossed back from the sea in yellow sand hills, irregular, studded with clumps of stunted grass: hills that stretched away inland to the eastern horizon in a broken perspective of rounded forms, sweltering beneath the sky of brass and its unblinking sun, lonely, desolate and barren—a monstrous bald place upon the poll of the earth. Not a sign of life was there; naught but sand and silence and the sun. Its effect of solitude seemed overpowering. Not even a bird of prey hung poised in the saffron sky; for here was nought to prey upon.

Those of the ship's company who were to land—that is, all save the complement of the yacht—watched the scene unceasingly, and with increasing perturbation. Surely, they said one to another, it was inconceivable that man could win him a foothold in this place of barrenness. They turned their eyes to le petit Lemercier, some of the more outspoken grumbling, fomenting mutiny among their fellows. Was he to take them there, to pen them in the solitude of that land without shade or water? Did he dream of this?

Even Lemercier himself was disturbed; the rosy visions that had been his, faded. For an instant he was perilously near