“Marcy on us!” muttered Old Bill, “if they have speered the glass!”
“Troth! that’s like enough,” said Terence. “It’ll be flashing in the sun outside the sand. The sharp-eyed Arab is almost sure to see it.”
“Had you not better draw it in?” suggested Harry Blount.
“True,” answered Colin. “But I fear it would be too late now. If that’s what halted them, it’s all over with us so far as hiding goes.”
“Slip it in anyhow. If they don’t see it any more they mayn’t come quite up to the ridge.”
Colin was about to follow the advice thus offered, when on taking what he intended to be a last squint through the telescope, he perceived that the travellers were moving on up the beach, as if they had seen nothing that called upon them to deviate from their course.
Fortunately for the four “stowaways” it was not the sparkle of the lens that had caused them to make that stop. A ravine or opening through the sand-ridges, much larger than that in which our adventurers were concealed, embouched upon the beach, some distance below. It was the appearance of this opening that had attracted the attention of the two mounted men; and from their gestures Colin could tell they were talking about it, as if undecided whether to go that way or keep on up the strand.
It ended by the yellow man putting spurs to his horse and galloping off up the ravine, followed by the black man on the camel.
From the way in which both behaved; keeping their eyes generally bent upon the ground, but at intervals gazing about over the country; it was evident they were in search of something, and this would be the she-camel, that lay tethered in the bottom of the sand-gorse, close to the spot occupied by our adventurers.
“They’ve gone off on the wrong track,” said Colin, taking his eye from the glass as soon as the switch tail of the maherry disappeared behind the slope of a sand-dune. “So much the better for us. My heart was at my mouth just a minute ago. I was sure it was all over with us.”