killed me!"

"Nearly, in war-time, means a whole new life to lose, sahib. Be
pleased to make the most of it!" he answered.

Within two minutes after that we had eight prisoners disarmed and
subdued, some of them rather the worse for battery. The amazing
thing was that we hadn't a serious casualty among the lot of us.
We could have totaled a square yard of skin, no doubt, and a
bushel of bruises (if that is the way you measure them) but mine
was the only knife-wound. I felt beastly proud.

By the light of the electric torch we dragged and prodded the
prisoners back whence they had come, and presently Grim or
somebody found a lantern and lit it. We found ourselves in a
square cavern--a perfect cube it looked like--about thirty feet
wide each way.

In the midst was a plain stone coffer with its lid removed and
set on end against it. In the coffer lay a tall man's skeleton,
with the chin still bound in linen browned with age. There were
other fragments of linen here and there, but the skeleton's bones
had been disturbed and had fallen more or less apart.

Over in one corner were two large bundles done up in modern gunny-
bags, and Grim went over to examine them.

"Hello!" he said. "Here's Scharnhoff and his lady friend!"

He ripped the lashings of both bundles and disclosed the Austrian
and the woman, gagged and tied, both almost unconscious from
inability to breathe, but not much hurt otherwise.

The Sikhs herded the prisoners, old alligator-eyes among them,
into another corner. Grim tore my shirt into strips to bandage
my arm with. Goodenough talked with Narayan Singh, while we
waited for Scharnhoff to recover full consciousness.

"Those murderers!" he gasped at last. "Schweinehunde!"

"Better spill the beans, old boy," Grim said, smiling down at
him. "You'll hang at the same time they do, if you can't tell a
straight story."

"Ach! I do not care! There were no manuscripts--nothing! I
don't know whose skeleton that is--some old king David, perhaps;
for that is not David's real tomb that the guides show. Hang
those murderers and I am satisfied!"

"Your story may help hang them. Come on, out with it!"

"Have you caught Noureddin Ali?"

"Never mind!"

"But I do mind! And you should mind!"

Scharnhoff sat up excitedly. He was dressed in the Arab garments
I had seen in his cupboard that day when Grim and I called on
him, with a scholar's turban that made him look very distinguished
in