"Licked at the start! They quit cold!" Sheffield, at his side, dropped to the sand, his heart drilled by a jagged slug.

The explosion of that shot crackled in from another line of dunes, off to eastward--a brown, burnt ridge, parched by the tropic sun of ages.
Sweating with the heat and the exertion of the charge, amazed at having found--in place of windrows of sleeping men--an enemy still distant and still as formidable as ever, the Legionaries for a moment remained without thought or tactics.
Rrisa, livid with fury and baffled hate, flung up wild arms and began screaming the most extravagant insults at the still invisible nomads, whose fire was now beginning again all along their line.
"O rejected ones, and sons of the rejected!" the Arab howled.

"O hogs and brothers of hogs!" He fell to gnawing his own hand, as Arabs will in an excess of passion.

Once more he screamed: "O Allah, deny not their skin and bones to the eternal flame! O owls, oxen, beggars, cut-off ones! Oh, give them the burning oil, Allah! The cold faces! Oh, wither their hands! Make them _kusah_! (beardless).

Oh, these swine with black livers, gray eyes, beards of red.