But the man with the pistol showed no signs of such an intention yet, he seemed content to wait and watch, keeping a strict blockade till his energy and resolution found themselves again. Jacques wondered what it would be like when he was dead and lying there always in the cave. Mansoor would not bother to bury him. He thought of what his companions in the Legion would say and think. They would fancy that he had deserted and had succeeded in making his escape. Then appeared before him the blue sea at Oran and Oran itself, with the barracks away up on the heights just as he had seen it on the first day of his arrival in Algeria, more than seven years ago. Then the sea, from a thought, became a vision and shimmered up to him and over him. Mansoor vanished, the cave, the sunlight at its door and the fact that he was held for Death. Jacques had fallen asleep. Had you fired a cannon in the ravine he would not have heard it. It was the sleep that follows on high excitement or profound exhaustion. He was awakened by the bugles of the Legion sounding the _réveillé_, so it seemed to him for a moment, then the bugles of the Legion became the crying of birds. Birds were flocking about the ravine, great birds whose shadows swept the ground in front of the cave. With the return of consciousness to Jacques came the return of full mental energy. He remembered everything, and recognized to his astonishment that it was evening, towards sundown, and that Mansoor was still in exactly the same position, his face half sheltered by his arm, taking aim. Yet it was morning when Jacques had fallen asleep. All the burning day the murderer must have lain like this, watching--or had sleep taken him too? Suddenly one of the great birds whose shadows had been flitting across the ground swept down and lighted on the head of Mansoor. It stood there for a second, fiery-eyed and swaying, like a funeral plume, then, shooting its head forward and downward, it peeped up into the face of the watching one and plucked out an eye. The birds of the desert always attack the eyes of a man first. The vultures will haul at a fallen man's head till they get the face sideways. Jacques, who knew all about the birds of the desert and their ways, gave a shout; next moment he was kneeling beside the dead man. Mansoor had been dead for hours, death had struck him most likely the moment he had changed the upright for the recumbent position, giving him only just time to lie down and take aim. His heart had given out owing to his exertions and the excitement of the chase, or a blood vessel had broken in his brain. Jacques took the pistol from the dead hand, not without a struggle. Then he saw why the pursued man had not fired on him. The magazine was empty. Mansoor must have been unable to obtain ammunition after the murder. He had used bluff. It is almost as good sometimes.