“I must have hit him in the leg,” said Dick. “I fired low.”
Buckhart struck a match and Dick made a hasty examination, questioning the wounded rascal. He found that Bunol had been wounded in the knee and was bleeding profusely. With his pocketknife Merriwell quickly cut away Miguel’s trousers and exposed the wound.
The Spaniard lifted the upper part of his body and looked at his bloody knee. A groan escaped him, and then he began to sob. All the nerve had been taken out of him.
Dick quickly cut a strip from the lower part of Bunol’s trousers leg, twisted it like a rope, tied it round the fellow’s leg above the knee, inserted his pistol barrel through the loop and began to twist, thus tightening the manufactured cord until it began to cut into the flesh and checked the flow of blood.
In the meantime Brad had been questioning Bunol about Nadia, and the cowered wretch confessed that she was hidden close at hand in a portion of an excavated temple and still guarded by one of the two black men.
A distant call startled the boys. When the call was repeated they recognized it as coming from some of their friends, and they answered it.
Soon Colonel Stringer, Coddington, the professor, and Budthorne came hastening through the palm grove. As they approached, they saw a man dodging away. They ordered him to stop, but this resulted in his fleeing still more swiftly, and he quickly disappeared.
Then the colonel declared he heard a low cry, not far away. The Texan joined them, declaring Bunol had confessed that Nadia was near by. They began searching, and soon they came upon the mouth of an excavation, one of many such, made by scientists in uncovering the ruins of old Memphis.
From the depths of this opening Nadia answered his call. In a reckless, headstrong manner, the Texan let himself down into the opening, released all holds and slid to the bottom.
“Here she is!” he shouted, in delighted satisfaction. “She’s all right! Hooray! Whoop! Whoop-ee! Get a rope from the steamer and yank us out.”