Before Billy's half breathed "Thanks, old man," had left his lips, however, another of Muley-Hassan's followers had rushed in and the moment would have been Lathrop's last but that Billy drove his fist into the fellow's face with a crashing blow that knocked him on the top of his fallen comrade. It was hand-to-hand fighting then with a vengeance. Billy seized hold of the muzzle of an Arab's revolver as it was thrust into his very face, and twisted it upward as it was discharged. Seizing up a camp chair Lathrop swung it round his head like a club and scattered the brains of a native follower of Muley-Hassan.
But strategy was to put an abrupt end to the fight even if it could have continued much longer.
Billy was bleeding from a cut over the forehead which blinded him, and Lathrop had got two nasty knife thrusts, one in the arm and the other in the fleshy part of the calf of his leg, when they were suddenly attacked from the rear by half-a-dozen slavers. The next minute, wounded and bound, they were as helpless as two captured puppies.
The fight was over, but the Arabs had come out of it with a badly crippled force.
Of the twenty-five men who had attacked the adventurers' camp ten had been killed outright and half a dozen others so badly wounded that they could not move. Hardly one of them had not received some minor injury, and the very fact that they had made such a poor showing against two American boys and a Krooman armed only with an axe, filled Muley-Hassan with savage rage.
Furiously the slave-dealer ordered the two boys brought before him. A huge fire had been lighted by his followers and in the glare cast by this he received them. It was a wild scene and the two boys hardly knew whether they were awake or dreaming, as they were roughly hustled into the presence of their captor.
Diego de Barros, his cruel, thin lips curled in a sneer that showed his yellow teeth, stood by the side of Muley-Hassan, the latter a tall determined-looking man with a crisp, curly black beard and a sinister cast of features. A long burnoose of white, worn after the Arab style, hung from his head and framed his dark features, which were just then overspread by a frown as black as thunder.
Outside the circle of firelight lay the bodies of the victims of the Krooman's axe and the boys' bullets. All who could do so of Muley-Hassan's followers were gathered about him, as the two young Americans were brought face to face with the man they had such good reason to fear.
"So these are the young Americans?" he asked as Billy and Lathrop returned his hawk-like gaze unflinchingly.
"No, sir," spoke up Diego, "they are not. Wiseman has just told me that the Chester boys have flown in their air-ship and these are the cubs left behind to guard the camp."