Captain Truck had thrown forward his
fowling-piece, but he did not fire.
"We have no right to shoot the fellow," he said, "and our hope is now in
the distance he will have to ride to join his comrades. If we have got a
chief, as I suspect, we will make a hostage of him, and turn him to as
much account, as he can possibly turn one of his own camels. Depend on it
we shall see no more of them for several hours, and we will seize the
opportunity to get a little sleep. A man must have his watch below, or he
gets to be as dull and as obstinate as a top-maul."
The captain having made up his mind to this plan was not slow in putting
it in execution. Returning to the beach they liberated the legs of their
prisoner, whom they found lying like a log on the sands, and made him
mount the staging to the deck of the ship. Leading the way into the cabin,
Mr. Truck examined the fellow by a light, turning him round and commenting
on his points very much as he might have done had the captive been any
other animal of the desert.
The Arab was a swarthy, sinewy man of forty, with all his fibres indurated
and worked down to the whip-cord meagreness and rigidity of a racer, his
frame presenting a perfect picture of the sort of being one would fancy
suited to the exhausting motion of a dromedary, and to the fare of a
desert.
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