eyes still seemed to see
stars.

There was a run, stumbling, with Billy's hand sustaining her, and
then she was on a camel, clutching the saddle as the beast rose
swiftly in response to urgent whacks, and beside her Billy was on
another. Some one on foot goaded the beasts into a startled run, and
behind them yells and screeches were growing louder and louder.

Over her lurching shoulder she had one last glimpse of a burning
building and saw flames pouring from the roof, and the room where
she had been an open furnace, and then she turned her face toward
the dark ahead.

"Hang tight," Billy was calling to her, and she saw him lean over
and lash both camels into furious speed. "Some one is riding after,"
and then he turned and shot his gun warningly into the air.

The yells behind them stopped. But after some moments they heard a
camel snarl, and knew that some one was still back there in the
darkness, hanging on their trail. So they rode hard ahead, into the
enveloping night, over the rolling dunes, with the wind leaping and
tearing and hurling the sand in their faces, as if the very elements
were fighting against them.

It was a strange chase and a hot one, pounding on and on, racked
with the wild, lurching flight, deeper and deeper into the
yellow-gray night that welcomed them with more strident blasts and
more stinging particles of sand.

"It's a storm," Billy shouted at her, raising his voice above the
wind. "It's been blowing up this way for an hour now--they won't
follow long in the face of it. Can you hang on a little longer?"

"Forever," she cried back, gripping the pommel tight and bending her
head before the whirling particles. There was sand in her hair, sand
on her lashes and in her eyes, sand on her face and down her neck,
and sand in her mouth when she wet her lips, but she heard herself
laughing in the night.

"By and by we'll get off," he called back, and by and by when the
hot, stifling, stinging, choking, whirling gale was too blinding to
be borne, he checked the camels in one of the hollows of the desert
dunes from which the wind was skimming ammunition for its peppery
assaults, and the beasts knelt with a haste that spoke of gladness.

"It's the backbone of it now; cover your head and lie down," Billy
commanded, and Arlee covered it with what he thrust into her
hands--his overcoat, she found--and tucked herself down against him
as he crouched beside the camels.

"I should think--it was-