He scrambled forward in the van and made a hasty survey of the situation.  Britt was stretched on the ground.  The two convicts were kneeling side by side, bending over their captive, and the short man was still plying Britt with questions.  Their backs were toward the man in the van.  Wagg was kneeling at Britt’s feet, holding the carriage lamp, shielding the flare with a curved palm.

The posture of all three of them invited the attack that Vaniman instantly decided on.  He could not hope that he would be offered a better opportunity.

He flung aside the flap, he leaped from the opening.  Spreading his knees, he landed on the convicts, a knee on each back, and then he brought his hands toward each other with all his strength, cuffing their skulls together with a resounding crack.  They fell across Britt.  Vaniman was on his feet while Wagg was rising; the guard’s slow mind was operating ineptly on his muscles.  The young man felled Wagg with a vicious blow under the ear.

The convicts, knocked senseless, were on their faces, pinning Britt to the ground.  The butts of the bulldog revolvers in their hip pockets were exposed.  Vaniman snatched out the weapons.  He aimed one of the revolvers at Wagg, who had struggled to his knees.  “Your knife!  Throw it to me!  Quick!”

Under the menace of the gun Wagg obeyed.

The young man pocketed the guns for a moment.  He rolled the reviving convicts off Britt and slashed the prisoner’s bonds and tore the towel from his face.  It was in his mind to force Britt to crawl into the van.  He was regarding Britt as his chief witness and principal exhibit in the exposure he proposed to lay before the people of Egypt.  In the back of Vaniman’s head there may have been some sort of consideration for the man who had ruined him—­scruples against leaving him with those renegades who had tortured him.  However, the young man was conscious of the more compelling motive—­to carry Britt along with him, to force Britt, before the eyes of men, to uncover the hiding place of the treasure.

He trained his guns on the three men, backing away from them in order to have them at a safe distance.  Britt was on his knees.  He was staring at Vaniman with unblinking eyes in which unmistakable mania was flaming.  The attack on him in his bed that night, the blow that had stunned him so that the assailants might tie him up, the ride in the strange conveyance, the dreadful uncertainty of what it was all about—­these matters had wrought cruelly upon the victim’s wits.  The torture by the flame had further unsettled his mind.  And at that moment, coming down from the heavens, so it seemed, a dead man had appeared to him.