"Well," said I, "I suppose we had better wait here till they come up, tell them that it is useless for them to try and catch the wily Arabs, and ride back with them to Hillah, or wherever they come from."
"Not a bit of it," said Edwards excitedly. "We must not meet them. I know the gentlemen; and if they find us here and their quarry gone, they are quite capable of shooting us off-hand as conspirators, and quietly putting us into a hole in the sand. Come on; there's plenty of time."
"Where to?" I asked, as we ran to our horses and mounted.
"After our Arab friends," was the reply. "They are not going any pace as yet."
So we dug our spurs into the flanks of our little beasts, and made them gallop over the baked desert. But gallop as we would, we did not appear to be gaining on our friends, and it seemed to us, on glancing back, that the Turkish troopers were overhauling us. Then, as we looked ahead, we saw the Arab horsemen suddenly disappear.
"Where on earth have they gone?" asked Edwards, turning to me.
"Heaven only knows," I replied, "unless they have got into a watercourse. We shall probably see them come out again in a minute."
We kept our eyes fixed ahead of us as we rode on, but no sign did we see of the reappearance of the party, and before long we discovered the cause. The track brought us to a deep dry watercourse, running almost at right angles to the route that we were following, and there, in the loose sand which formed the bed, we could see the footprints of the horses. We drew rein, and looked at each other, for the horsemen seemed to have gone both ways—up the watercourse and down it.
"Which way?" I asked Edwards.
"Haven't a ghost of an idea," said he.