“The man’s dead!” he shouted. “Gege-Merak is gone!”
It was true enough. The wily chief had managed to slip his bonds and plunge a knife to the heart of his unsuspecting guard before he crawled away into the night and escaped.
We were horrified at the disaster. Our fears had now become realities, and as we looked gravely into one another’s eyes under the dim stars we realized that our lives were in deadly peril.
“You’re a lot of clods—of duffers—of fools!” screamed the Professor, stamping the ground in furious rage. “You deserve to die for being so clumsy; you deserve to lose the treasure you are not clever enough to guard! Bah! to think I have leagued myself with idiots!”
Archie grabbed him by the shoulder and gave him a good shaking.
“Shut up, you red-whiskered ape!” he said, menacingly. “Keep a civil tongue in your head, or I’ll skin you alive!”
We were all irritated and unnerved, and I tried to quiet both Archie and Van Dorn, and to bring them to a more reasonable frame of mind.
“It’s no use crying over spilt milk,” said I. “Let’s face the peril like men, and do our best to get the treasure safely to the ship. Even if Gege-Merak gets the rest, we have a fortune already.”
“He’ll get that, too,” groaned the Professor. “The chief has more cunning than the whole crowd of you.”
The two camels were now heavily loaded with the sealed canvas sacks containing the treasure and the library of historic papyri. We next strapped the four panniers to the two beasts—one on either side of each camel—and Van Dorn with the remainder of his wax smeared the buckles so that if the panniers were opened or tampered with we should speedily know the fact. He did not trust us wholly, it seemed, nor did we fully trust him. The man had been acting ugly of late, and the fact that we had no chance to examine any of the treasure we had so quickly thrust into the sacks made it necessary that the seals remain intact until we could open them in safety and in each other’s presence.