Meanwhile in Tunis Kheyr-ed-Din was working double tides. He was kept well informed by his spies of all that was going on, and his preparations for defence were as adequate as they could be made; the corsairs, as we have said, had come flocking in at his call. He had withdrawn as many of his fighting men from Algiers as he deemed prudent. Knowing that the attack was directed against him personally, he had not much fear that it would be diverted at the last moment. It would have been true strategy on the part of Charles to have done this, but the Emperor considered that his honour required that the attack should be an absolutely direct one, and so Algiers was left on one side, to the ultimate upsetting of his plans. We say this because, although in this case he was to take Tunis and to restore to the throne of that country the puppet King Muley Hassan, and although he was to rescue some twenty thousand Christian captives, he did not capture Barbarossa, who was to live for many years to continue and to carry on his unceasing war against the Christians. There was no artifice left untried by the despot of Tunis. To the African princes, Moors as well as Arabs and Berbers, did Kheyr-ed-Din send embassies. For these he chose cunning men well versed in the means of exciting the furious passions of these primitive and ferocious peoples, and it was their mission to represent Muley Hassan as an infamous apostate who was prompted by ambition and revenge, not only to become the vassal of a Christian king, but to conspire with him to extirpate the Mohammedan faith. The subtle policy inflamed these ignorant and bigoted Mohammedans to the point of madness, and from far and near they threw in their lot with the man who represented himself to be the rallying-point for all those in Africa who desired not only to preserve their holy religion but also their personal liberty. From Tripoli and Jerba, from Bougie and Bona, from the shores of Shott-el-Jerid, through all the dim hinterland that stretches from thence north-westwards to Algiers, the tribesmen came flocking in. The wild riders of the desert had been rounded up, and it is said that no less than twenty thousand horsemen, in addition to an innumerable crowd of infantry, responded to the call of the master schemer who was but using these guileless savages to further his own personal ends. The land-pirates of the desert, those stormy petrels whose lives only differed from those of the followers of Kheyr-ed-Din in that they carried on their depredations on the land instead of on the sea, camped in their thousands in the environs of Tunis and boasted of the deeds which they were about to perform. Kheyr-ed-Din stimulated their enthusiasm with presents of the most costly description. Ever wise and politic, he knew when it was necessary to pay royally, and on this occasion surpassed himself in prodigality. For all this he himself cherished no illusions; he had the measure of the fighting