"There was nothing else to do." Ryder had withdrawn his arm; the two men faced each other across the girl. "I was in a blue funk—you see, I was hiding her in the inner chamber until I could smuggle her away. And when those wolves came on the scent, and not an instant to lose—I got the bandages off the real mummy and about Aimée.... Lord, it was a close call!"
He drew a long breath. "I hadn't a gun. I hadn't a thing—and I had to grin and play it through ... And I was deathly afraid of Thatcher."
"Thatcher?"
"Yes, Thatcher. You see I'd popped the mummy into a case without its bandages and if Thatcher had glimpsed that he'd have said something—Oh, innocently—that would have given the show away. He knew there was only one mummy and it was wrapped. But the Lord was with me. The men opened the empty case first and at the second they said nothing to show it wasn't empty and Thatcher didn't look in. Then they went on to the third."
"And me—when I heard those voices—I stopped breathing," said the girl. "But I shook so—I thought they would think that mummy was coming to life! And the dust—Oh, it was almost beyond my force not to sneeze—"
"You'd have sneezed us to Kingdom Come," said Ryder, gayly now.
"But I did not," she protested. "I lay there and thought of Hamdi looking down upon me, and my flesh crept.... Oh, it was terrible! And yet it was funny."
Funny.... McLean gazed in sardonic astonishment upon the two young creatures with such misguided humor that they found something funny in this appalling business. Flying from palaces ... hiding in tombs ... taking a mummy's place beneath the dusty bandages of the dead ... Funny....
And yet there was laughter in their young eyes when they looked at each other and a curve of astounding amusement in their lips.
It touched McLean to wonder. It touched him—queerly—to an odd and aching pain. For he saw suddenly that he was looking upon something deathless and imperishable, yet fragile and fleeting as the breath of time....