“And bless you,” said Idris. “Tell us what you did.”
“When we had sworn,” continued the Bedouin, “I said to the young man: ‘But who can prove to us that you yourself do not belong to the thieves who are fleeing with the white children and have left you here to hold up the pursuers?’ I bade him to swear, too, which he did, and he believed us all the more. We began to question him, asking what orders had come from the sheiks along the copper wire, and whether the thieves were being pursued in the desert. He replied in the affirmative, and said that they had been promised great rewards; also that all ravines at a distance of two days’ journey from the river were guarded, and that there were large baburis (steamers) filled with Englishmen and soldiers continually passing up and down the river.”
“Neither ships nor soldiers are of any avail against the power of Allah and the prophet.”
“And now tell us how you made way with that fellow?”
The one-eyed Bedouin pointed to his companion.
“Abu Anga,” he said, “then asked him if there were no other guards nearby, and on his replying in the negative, he suddenly drove his knife into his throat, so that the latter never uttered a sound. We threw him into a deep hollow and covered him up with stones and thorns. In the village they will think that he has fled to the Mahdi, for he told us that such things have happened.”
“May God bless those who flee, as he has blessed us,” answered Idris.
“Yes, we have been blessed!” answered Abu Anga. “For now we know we must keep three days’ journey away from the river, and besides that we have captured a gun, which we needed, and also a camel to milk.”
“The bags,” added the one-eyed man, “are filled with water, and there is a fair amount of millet in the saddle bags, but we did not find much powder.”
“Chamis has several hundred cartridges, which belong to this white boy’s gun, which we don’t know how to shoot. But the powder is the same and it will also do for our gun.”
Still Idris became thoughtful as he heard these words, and a very troubled look was imprinted on his dark face, for he realized that as one had already been killed, even Stasch’s intervention could not protect them from being punished, in case they should now fall into the hands of the Egyptian Government.
