Fate for them and for all the Legion, lay on so slight a thing as the stirring of a twig, the _tunk_ of a boot against a bleached camel's skull, the possibility of a sneeze or cough.
Even the chance scaring-up of a hyena or a vagrant jackal might betray them.

Every breath, every heartbeat was pregnant with contingencies of life and death.
Groveling, they slipped forward, dim, moving shadows in a world of brown obscurity.

At any moment, one might lay a hand on a sleeping puff-adder or a scorpion.

But even that had been fore-reckoned.

All three of them had thought of such contingencies and weighed them.
Not one but had determined to suppress any possible outcry, if thus stricken, and to die in absolute silence.
What mattered death for one, if two should win to the close range necessary for discharging the lethal capsules?
What mattered it even for two, if one should succeed?
The survivors, or the sole survivor, would simply take the weapons from the stricken and proceed.
After what seemed more than an hour, though in fact it was but the ten minutes agreed on with Bohannan, off behind them toward the coast a sudden staccato popping of revolvers began to puncture the night.