et
you to the hotel--"

"Hotel--?" the girl echoed with a faint implication of humor in that
silver bell of a voice.

She put her hands to her hair and to her face in which the hues of
life mingled with the pallor of exhaustion; on her small fingers
sparkled the gleam of diamonds and from her slender arms fell back
the gold and jade tissues of her chiffon robe.

To McLean she had increasingly the appearance of a creature of
enchantments. And to see that young loveliness in its strange gleam
of color lying against his friend's supporting tan linen arm--

Sardonically his eyes sought Ryder.

"So that was your mummy!"

"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 Ryder had withdrawn his arm; the two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 Aimee....
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