'Cameron!'
The name escaped him, while a strange sensation crept over Allan, and his voice as he spoke sounded thick in his own ears.
But it was no optical illusion—no disembodied spirit he saw, as he thought he had done before, but his friend and comrade still in the body, but pale now and barely convalescent after the dreadful wound he had received.
He grasped the hand of Allan, and laughed at the mingled expression of blank amazement and dismay he read there, emotions which were gradually replaced by those of satisfaction and delight.
'I was supposed to be dead and buried in the sand, like Lieutenant O'Brien in "Peter Simple," but, unlike Lieutenant O'Brien, I was not discovered by a pretty girl treading on my nose,' said Cameron, laughing, and in reply to some inarticulate words of Allan, on the side of whose bed he seated himself.
'Tell me—tell me about it,' said Allan, huskily.
'You could scarcely have left me ere I began to recover from the syncope—for a syncope it was—only you and Sergeant Farquharson were not doctors enough to discover that it was so. A sense of suffocation made me struggle up and throw off my blanket and the covering of light sand in which you had so kindly tucked me; and as the blanket fell from my face the dew refreshed me, and I perceived in a moment the fatal mistake into which you had all fallen. Dark though it was, the detachment was still in sight, and I could hear your voices; I tried to call out, but lacked the power to do so, and a horror fell upon me, with insensibility after a time, and, when I recovered, I found a group of mounted Bedouins gazing at me in stupid wonder to see a living man half buried in the sand.'
'But how was it that we totally failed to find all trace of the spot where we interred you?'
'How strange the question sounds as you frame it,' said Cameron, smiling. 'A sandstorm came on, and must have obliterated the landmarks.'
'We heard shots as we fell back.'