She answered, after a moment, “There’s another close behind him.  I just saw him on top of a little hill.  I suppose they can see us?”

“Probably.”  Billy’s face was grave.  If they continued their winding path in from the desert to the intervening hills that shut them from the Nile valley, and the horsemen continued their course along the base of those hills, they would soon meet.

“Do you mind speeding up a little?” he asked.  “I’d rather like to cross to the Nile ahead of that gentry.”

But as they speeded up the pursuers did the same, and from mere dots they grew to tiny figures, clearly discernible, furiously galloping over the sands.

Billy thought hard about his cartridges, wishing he had more in his clothes.  When he had left the hotel that Tuesday evening he had thrust the loaded revolver in his pocket, but he had already discharged it twice at the beginning of their flight....  And then he startlingly reflected that the Captain could easily cause their arrest for stealing those camels, and wild and dreadful thoughts of native jails and mixed tribunals darted into his harassed and anxious mind.  As a long ridge of sand intervened between them and their pursuers he made a sudden decision.

“Let’s turn off,” he said quickly, and from the little winding path, edging southeast, they struck directly south over the trackless sand.

“You see, they’ll expect us to make a railroad station as soon as possible,” he explained, “and they are probably trying to nab us on the way to it—­if those men have anything to do with us at all.”  He said nothing about his vivid fear of arrest for the camels and the tool such an arrest would be for Kerissen’s designs.  He merely added, “I think we’d better try to give them the slip and steer clear of all the little native joints until we get to Girgeh, which is big enough to give us some protection.  There must be an English something-or-other there....  I really think we ought to go as fast as we can now, and when the way is clear, hurry across the hills into the Nile valley.”

But the way did not become clear.  Disconcerted by that unexpected dash off the path, and reduced for a time to mere dots again, the horsemen, three in a row now, hung persistently upon their left flank, keeping a parallel course between them and the hills.

The day had dawned with a promise of sultry heat, and as the sun rose higher and higher in the heavens the heat grew more and more intolerable to their ill-protected heads and thirsty tongues.  The gaiety of yesterday was gone; the enchantment had vanished from the waste spaces, and the desert was less a friend now than an enemy.  Chokingly the dust rose about them, and glaringly the gold of the burning sands beat back the glare of the down-pouring sun.  From such a heat the landscape seemed to shrink and veiled itself with a faint and swimming haze.

By noon the flask of water in Billy’s pocket was empty.  By noon their mouths were parched and their skins burning.  And still on their left there hung the hounding dots, like prowling jackals.