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Show -~ . -k \~ ' ~.,----~· Then he tried to pull himself to-~~...___ " '· .'0 _:: gether, staring towards the rocky!~; ' -~ '-;;) rampart now close at hand, and fix- j ~;.!~:~· ing his thoughts on the cosey inn, the ~, - ""' comfortable bed, the long sleep that ~ -~ awaited him. And then Kitty! Soon --..he would see her. He pictured himself stealing into her room, shading the candle with his hand, and looking down on her slight form, her pretty, fair head with the yellow hair spread out over the pillow. He bent his long legs backward and struck his tired mule with his heels. The poor brute, whose tripping walk had long since degenerated into an uneasy shamble, started forward in a sort of convulsive canter, and passed Achmed, who was hunched up and seemed to have fallen asleep shrouded in his burnous with the hood drawn closely round his face. But the canter only lasted a moment. The animal was nearly dead beat, like its rider, and subsided almost at once into it$ former tragic pace. As Sir Claude passed him, Achmed's one eye peered sharply forth from the shadow of the hood, and when his master's mule ceased from cantering, the guide sat up on his pack-saddle and threw off his elaborate pretence of sleep. He had a knife hidden under his burnous, and now he laid his hand upon it, looking steadily at the hind-legs of the mule in front. He wanted to get into El-Akbara before Sir Claude, and he was considering how to accomplish this with- \ out waking suspicion in the Roumi. The failure of his attempt to wheedle his employer into parting with the hundred francs he longed for ir- :== ritated him, almost infuriated him. ~. He knew that he would not get the money, and he hated Sir Claude as -,_ an Arab hates the man always who \~~a_!!les his Presently he drew |