“It’s dreadful, boys!” I gasped, appalled by what we had done.
“So it is,” answered Joe, nodding; “but it was our lives against theirs, Sam, and——”
He paused abruptly, glaring at something behind me. Archie screamed a warning and I sprang to my feet to find that the third Arab had recovered consciousness and was about to plunge a knife into my back.
I caught his wrist and struggled to hold the keen blade away from me, but the fellow was strong as an ox and mad with rage. Archie came to the rescue and dealt him a couple of stinging blows, so that he dropped the knife and caught us both in a fierce embrace, crushing the two of us against his breast while he dragged us nearer to the well.
I realized his intention and screamed and struggled without avail. Nearer and nearer to the scorpion pit we were dragged until all three of us, a writhing mass of flesh and muscle, were tottering on the brink.
The fight at the scorpion pit.
Suddenly a pistol shot cracked—seemingly close to my ear—and the Arab’s head dropped. He gave us one final, spasmodic hug, and partly relaxed his grasp. I felt that we were all three reeling into the awful depths below, when my hair was clutched and I was torn from that terrible embrace and hurled to the earth. It was Joe who had saved me, and from where I lay I saw him straining to save Archie also from falling into the well. The Arab was either dead or desperately wounded, but with his final instinct of enmity he clung to Archie on one side while Joe dragged at him from the other.
The Arab’s body, however, was hanging over the pit, and its weight would soon draw my struggling, desperate friends after it unless prompt help was rendered them. I again leaped up and, half dazed as I was, clung frantically to Joe, and my added weight gave us the victory. For the Arab’s grasp slackened and his body slowly collapsed and fell with a thud to the bottom of the pit, while we three, clinging together and panting from our efforts, staggered away to sink weakly upon the ground.
It had all happened in half the time it takes to tell it, and for a moment the sudden revulsion from impending death to absolute freedom was more than we could comprehend. A little time ago we were being dragged by our terrible captors to the scorpion pit, there to meet a frightful death, and now two of our assailants were themselves in the pit, while the third lay motionless before us!