Out of the Triangle | Page 8

creeping underneath it, lay breathless in the darkness.
The man struggled to his feet. Up past the other side of the rock rushed
the pursuer. Timokles, quaking, expected every instant to be
discovered.
"Where art thou?" savagely called the man. "Where?"
He ran hither and thither with fiercely muttered imprecations. Now his
footsteps sounded farther off, and now again he ran back and came
softly stealing around among the rocks. Timokles laid his branded
cheek against the gravel, and waited.
The footsteps went, and came, and went again in the dark. Timokles
trembled from head to foot. He did not fear death, but he dreaded
capture and unknown terrors.
The dark form passed by again. A chill went over Timokles, as he
thought he saw a weapon in the man's hand.
The footsteps became inaudible once more. Timokles, waiting a long
time, imagined his foe might have gone. As the lad was about to lift his

head, a hand brushed along the side of his rock, and reached out into
the dark, underneath. Timokles was perfectly quiet. The hand above
him felt down the sides of the rock, waved in the darkness above the
boy, descended and rested an instant on the gravel next him--but did
not touch him. The silent menace of the groping hand was terrible.
Timokles held his breath.
The hand passed on, feeling of other rocks.
"O God of thy people, thou hast hidden me!" cried Timokles in his
heart, as he heard the soft rubbing of his enemy's hand against the
farther rocks.
The sound died away. Timokles lay listening for a long time. Once he
thought he heard a creeping sound, but it was only the wind.
Sleep came upon him at last, and when he woke it was day. He dared
not come out, but lay there through the torrid hours, moistening his lips
now and then with a little water from the small, skin water- pouch he
carried.
The sun plunged beneath the horizon at last, with the usual seeming
suddenness observed in the desert. Night was welcome to Timokles,
and he came forth. The lad's heart was very lonely. He looked toward
the northeast, and remembered his Alexandrian home--his mother, the
brother with whom Timokles' whole life had been bound up, the little
sister Cocce, whom Timokles had last seen playing gleefully with a toy
crocodile, and laughing at its opening mouth.
"O Severus!" whispered Timokles, "what didst thou see, when thou
visitedst Egypt five years ago, that thou shouldest decree such evil
against the Egyptian Christians now?"
Softly Timokles went his way in the dark. He was hungry, yet he dared
eat little of the dried dates he had with him. When would he find other
food?
For a time he looked warily around, but soon his sense of loneliness

overcame his fear, and he watched more for some sign of his four
friends than for an indication of an enemy.
"Perhaps some Christian hath escaped, even as I have," thought
Timokles.
He started.
Outstretched before him lay a figure of a man! Timokles stood
motionless, till he perceived the man be to be asleep. Then the lad bent
over the sleeper to scan his face. But, as Timokles stooped, he dimly
saw, in the relaxed, open palm of the man's hand, a small stone of the
triangular form under which the Egyptians were wont to worship Osiris,
Isis, and Horus. Such are the stones found in the tombs of the
Egyptians.
This was no Christian sleeper that lay at Timokles' feet! The lad turned
and fled into the distance.
Through the desert there wailed a thin, plaintive cry. It was the voice of
a night-wandering jackal.
Timokles was dizzy to faintness, and staggered as he was driven on. He
had been discovered and taken. His life had been spared that he might
henceforth be a slave.
"I bear this for thy sake, O Lord, dear Lord!" murmured the exhausted
lad, as the blows drove him through the pathless desert.
Again came the plaintive cry of the wandering jackal.
"For thy sake!" faintly repeated Timokles.
A few minutes passed, and once more the jackal's inarticulate voice
wailed through the desert, but Timokles had fallen, helpless. A man
sprang forward, and the lash fell again and again on Timokles' prostrate
body, but the boy did not stir.
"Now see how the Christian would die in the desert, and cheat us of all

the work he might do!" grumbled the vexed voice of a dismounted
camel-rider. "He is young. There are many years of work in him!"
"Leave him!" scornfully advised another, who held a torch. "Some
beast will find him."
Nay, but he shall go with me to Carthage," asserted a third, from the
height of his camel's back. "Carthage knoweth what to do