Very silently he returned to Burroughs, and when he had made a trifle of a toilet and eaten far from a trifle of lunch, the two young men stretched themselves out in the shade, just beyond the entrance of the tomb, conversing in low tones, while around them the labor song of Burroughs’ workmen rose and fell in unvarying monotony, as from a nearby hole they carried out baskets of sand upon their heads and poured the contents upon the heap where the patient sifters were at work.

Burroughs talked of his work, the only subject of which he was capable of long and sustained conversation.  He dilated upon a rare find of some blue-green tiles of the time of King Tjeser, a third dynasty monarch, and a mummy case of one of the court of King Pepi, of the sixth dynasty, “about 3300 B.C.,” he translated for Billy, and then suddenly he saw that Billy’s eyes were absent and Billy’s pipe was out.

In sudden silence he knocked out the ashes from his own pipe and slowly refilled it.  “Congratulations,” he ejaculated, and at Billy’s slow stare he jerked his head back toward the tomb.  “I say, congratulations, old man.”

“Oh!” Billy became ludicrously occupied with the dead pipe.

“Nothing doing,” he returned decidedly.

“No? ...  I thought——­”

“You sounded as if you had been thinking.  Don’t do it again.”

“And also I had been remembering,” said Burroughs, with caustic emphasis, “knowing that in the past wherever youth and beauty was concerned——­”

So successfully had that past been sponged from Billy’s concentrated heart, so utterly had other youth and beauty ceased to exist for him, that he greeted the reminder with belligerent unwelcome.

“I tell you it was all an accident,” he retorted irritably.  “There’s nothing more to it....  Hello, our horseman is coming this way again!”

Grateful for the interruption to this ticklish excursion into his sacred emotions, he jumped to his feet and went out to meet the man who was riding slowly toward them, the two others in his train.  Burroughs went with him, and a brief parley followed.

“He says,” Burroughs translated, “that these are his camels and he is going to take them away.  He says you stole them from him at Assiout.”

“That’s right,” Billy confirmed easily.  “He can have ’em,” and Burroughs, vouchsafing no comment on this curious development, gave the message to the Nubian.  Then he turned again to Billy.  “He wants:  the money for their hire.”

“For their——!  Of all the dad-blasted, iron-clad cheek!  You just tell him for me that he’ll get his ‘hire’ all right if he hangs around me.  Tell him I’ll have him arrested for molesting and robbing travelers; and tell him to tell his master that if he shows his head near an English girl again I’ll have him hanged as high as Haman—­and shot to pieces while he swings!  The infernal scoundrel——­”

Whatever work Burroughs made of this translation it sent the sullen, inscrutable-looking fellow off in silence, his followers leading the recovered camels.