"Come on up, and make yourself at home," invited Dick. "Are you lost? Hungry or thirsty, perhaps?"
"Neither one nor the other, may it please you," was the somewhat whimsical retort. "Yet I will join you if only for a little while. Then I must get back, or my guards will be thinking that I have escaped."
"Guards," murmured Paul, in a low voice. "He must be a prisoner—but in this lonely place——"
"I thought we were the only ones here," added Innis.
"Hush! Here he comes!" cautioned our hero.
A man advanced into the glare of the firelight. He was seen to be a young fellow, of about twenty-five perhaps, of rather frail build, dressed in a negligee costume, well suited to that hot climate, and yet his clothing, as Innis instinctively noticed, was well tailored and fitted him perfectly. Innis was more fastidious about his dress than either of his chums, and naturally noticed the garments of others more closely.
"Greeting, fair sirs!" exclaimed the newcomer. "It is very kind of you to extend your hospitality to a stranger, and I thank you. Permit me to make myself known to you. I am Harry Cameron, sometime of San Francisco, at present of the desert waste; an engineer by profession, a dilly-dallier of verse by avocation, and actually in durance vile for the time being. Such is my brief but not unhappy history."
The three chums looked at one another, hardly knowing what to make of their visitor, who took a seat on part of the old broken wagon—a "prairie schooner" of a bygone age—and stretched out his legs in a comfortable attitude, gazing at Dick's party.
"An escaped lunatic," thought Innis, rather thankful that the stranger seemed to be of the mild type.