The unlucky thirteen had no earthly chance. The Goumiers swept down upon them, killing seven, and taking prisoners the remaining six. As I was marching with the artillery at the time, I missed this little engagement, and my first knowledge of it was when the prisoners trailed by me on foot: six tall, gaunt, brown men, bare-legged, and three of them bare-headed, none clad in more than a dirty cotton shirt that dragged to his knees. They moved in quick, frightened steps, keeping close to one another and obeying their captors implicitly. Allah had deserted them and their souls were as water. The Goumiers, fellow Mohammedans and devout--I have seen them pray--followed on tight-reined ponies, riding erect in high desert saddles, their coloured kaftans thrown back from their sword-arms--brown men these too, with small black eyes and huge noses. French soldiers of the Foreign Legion drove three undersized asses, carrying immense pack-saddles of straw and sacking meant to pad their skinny backs and to keep a rider’s feet from trailing ground. They were too small to be worth halter or bridle, and the soldiers prodded them on with short, pointed sticks, that brought to my mind Stevenson’s ‘Travels with a Donkey.’ One of the Frenchmen brought along a gun, a long-barrelled Arab flintlock, an antiquated thing safer to face than to fire. Besides this, I was told, one of the prisoners had carried a bayonet fastened with a hemp string to the end of a stick; the others seem to have been unarmed. They were indeed a poor bag. Without the least idea that such prisoners would be shot, I did not follow to their summary trial, but moved, instead, over to a spring, where some artillerists were watering their horses, while a dozen sporting tortoises stirred the mud. The gunners had bread and water, while I had none. Bread and water are heavy on campaign, and a few cigarettes I had found were good barter. My cigarettes were distributed and we were just beginning our breakfast, when a man standing up called our attention to the Goumiers coming our way again with the Moors. They were walking in the same order, the prisoners first in a close group, moving quickly on foot, not venturing to look back, the Goumiers, probably twenty, riding steady on hard bits. ‘_Pour les tuer_,’ said a soldier, smiling; ‘_Pour les tuer_,’ repeated the others, looking at me to see if I smiled. I shook my head in pity, for the doomed men were ignorant, pitiable creatures.