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Updated: June 14, 2025
"Hurrah for Lady MacGregor!" the watcher said under his breath. "She wired on my telegram, and caught him before he'd passed the last station. I might have known she would, the glorious old darling!" He hurried inside the bordj to knock at the ladies' door, and tell the news. "They're in sight!" he cried. "Would you like to come outside the gate and look?"
"It's Sabine who has chased the Arabs. The others are just too late," he thought. And he saw that the rescuers from Oued Tolga must reach the bordj half an hour in advance of the men from Azzouz. He was anxious to know what news Sabine had, and the eagerness he felt to hear details soothed the pain and shame which weighed upon his heart.
Now, on the former occasion, instead of descending into the bordj from the railway line, I rode with the Tripolitan once more out of the rock-portal into the plain, that glowed with the fugitive fires of sunset. It is a treeless waste, bereft of every sign of cultivation.
They had not made a hurried march from the desert city, for Stephen and Sabine had calculated the hour at which Nevill might have received the summons, and the time he would take on the return journey. It was possible, Lady MacGregor being what she was, that she might have rewired the telegram to a certain bordj, the only telegraph station between Touggourt and Oued Tolga.
On its further side there was no sign of life. No traveller was resting there that night, and the big door that led into the inner court was closed and barred. The guardian had gone to join the Arabs at the Cafe Maure. Between the shadow cast by the bordj and the shadow cast by the palm trees stood the two tents on a patch of sand.
"Nothing," Stephen answered, "except that the driver of the carriage ahead let drop at the last bordj that he'd been hired by the French officer, who was taking Maïeddine with him." "Just what we thought," Lady MacGregor broke in. "And the carriage will bring the Frenchman back, later. Maïeddine's going on. But I haven't found out where." "H'm!
And still they had not moved, when Nevill Caird was close enough to the bordj for a shout of greeting to be heard. "There are two of the strangest-looking creatures with him!" cried Saidee. "What can they be on camels!" "Why," exclaimed Victoria, "it's those men in kilts, who waited on the table at Mr. Caird's house!" "Hurrah for Lady MacGregor again!" laughed Stephen.
In front, beyond a watercourse, now dried up, rose the low hill on which stood the Bordj, a huge, square building, with two square towers pierced with loopholes. From a distance it resembled a fort threatening the desert in magnificent isolation. Its towers were black against the clear lemon of the failing sunlight.
It is a long cry from the bordj of Toudja among the dunes of the southern desert, to Algiers, yet Nevill begged that he might be taken home. "You know why," he said to Stephen, and his eyes explained, if Stephen needed explanations. Nevill thought there might be some chance of seeing Josette in Algiers, if he were dying. But the army surgeon from Oued Tolga pronounced it unsafe to take him so far.
It struck me that it would be more agreeable, instead of once more following the windings of the brook, to proceed along the railway a single line that climbs down from Ras-el-Aioun to within a few hundred yards of the bordj, where my horse was waiting. Plausible reasoning.
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