“Then I will tell you. These Bedouins are men who deal in slaves. You will be taken from Syria into Arabia and sold as a slave to black men. There can be no escape. You will become a beast of burden. All day long you will labor like a camel beneath the scorching sun of Arabia, driven by black men, who will beat you when you falter. Your soft and tender hands will become hardened and calloused. Your fine shoulders will become stooped and your back bent. Your rounded, muscular body will grow thin and emaciated. But the distress of body that must suffer will not compare with your distress of mind. Think of it!
“Think of yourself, a wretched and hopeless slave, lost in the desert, weary and footsore, trying to sleep at night, but haunted with dreams of your home far across the ocean. You will dream of those days when you were a leader at school; when you were triumphant on the football field or the diamond; when you were lifted on the shoulders of your shouting companions and carried aloft in triumph. Then you will ’wake to realize your pitiful state and know that never again can you look on the faces of those comrades and friends, but that you must go on through the wretched days of your wretched life, a thing to be beaten, scoffed at, spit on, and perhaps finally cut to death with whips. How like you the revenge I have planned? Isn’t it a fine thing, indeed?”
Dick had grown gray and rigid as the venomous Spaniard painted the picture.
There was silence in the tent when Bunol finished. That silence was broken by Merriwell, who spoke in a low, intense tone.
“You human fiend!”
Bunol’s thin lips curled back and exposed his pointed, white teeth. He was smiling.
For a long time Dick Merriwell had controlled himself in a masterful manner, but now the aroused passions of his fiery nature burst beyond suppression. Suddenly, and without the least warning, he flung himself on his enemy, whom he clutched by the throat before an outcry could be made.
Bunol was hurled flat on his back. Dick’s thumbs bored into the Spaniard’s throat. The knee of the American boy was planted on the breast of his foe, pinning the fellow to the mat.
“You devil!” hissed Dick in Bunol’s ear. “You have said I have not the blood to kill any one, but when my hands leave your neck you will be dead!”
Bunol had goaded the boy to a point of fury that was close allied to madness.