He whirled. "I'll fire!" he warned, staring into the dark, but his eyes, dazed with the sun, discerned nothing, and in utter ignorance he faced the black possibilities.
"A man—a hand——" Arlee gasped incoherently.
"Good Lord, what is it?" said a voice so near at hand that both were startled.
"Burroughs!" ejaculated Billy. "Is it you—Burroughs?"
"Yes, it's I, Burroughs," the owner of the voice retorted irritably. "And who the deuce are you?"
"Hill—Billy B. Hill," came the jubilant answer, and "Billy be damned!" said the astonished voice, with sudden joviality, and a dark shape strode up to them. "What on earth are you doing here? And what about that firing? Think I was a robber bold?"
"Well, there are three robber sneaks outside that we are hiding from, so I wasn't sure.... Great Cæsar, old scout, but I'm glad to see you! That puts us out of the woods at last.... It's the excavator friend," he added, turning to Arlee. "Burroughs, I present you to Miss Beecher. She and I have been having a thoroughly impossible adventure."
"Let's have a little light upon these introductions," returned the excavator, and a click was heard, and a light jumped out overhead, flooding the tunnel-like place with brightness. In its beams the three stood staring queerly at each other.
Arlee saw a slim, wiry young American, in rough khaki clothes stained with work, a browned, unshaven young man with sleepy looking eyes and a mouth like a steel trap.
What the excavator saw was more surprising. There was his friend Billy, whom two weeks before he had seen off on a Nile steamer returning to Cairo, in tropic splendor of white serge and Panama hat, now a scarlet spectacle of sunburn and dirt, in most disgraceful tweeds, and beside him what Burroughs took to be a child in tatterdemalion white, a silky, fluttering white, which even his untrained observation knew was hardly elected for desert wear. The little girl's hair was hanging tangled over her shoulders, and was much the color of the sand with which her face was coated, and underneath that coating he saw that she was red as a peony with sun and wind. They were a startling pair.