Then it was that the _Times_ reporter heard an Italian say, '_Poveri Egiziani_! If you had only seen them before, instead of _after_!'
The Black Watch were halted for a minute or two, prior to marching back to camp, when suddenly Cameron said to Allan, in a loud whisper,
'Look--there is the fellow I saw on the hotel balcony.'
Allan turned, and amid a crowd of Egyptians, Italians, and jabbering and gesticulating _bheesties_ and _syces_ (water-carriers and grass-cutters), belonging to our Indian contingent, he saw a man with a fair beard and a pallid face regarding him steadily with keen eyes and knitted brow; but, the moment he turned towards him, the stranger shrank back amid the crowd, and disappeared.
'Hawke Holcroft, by heaven,' exclaimed Cameron.
'Impossible! He is dead,' replied Allan, feeling curiously uncomfortable nevertheless.
'I would I were as sure of a thousand guineas,' said Cameron.
'One reads of such things only in romances--yet the eyes and beard were the colour of those of Holcroft.'
'Truth is always strange--"stranger than fiction," as Byron tells us.'
'Stranger, indeed, should this prove the case. But, if alive, how comes he here, and why does he seem to dog me?'
'I regarded him at first vacantly, then with indistinct recognition, and anon with certainty, though the beard and red tarboosh disguise him so much!'
Allan Graham knew not what to think. If the man referred to was actually Holcroft, by what miracle was he then in Grand Cairo, and how was he rescued from the sea? Strange it was, indeed, that if the lurker at the hotel was he, Allan should dream of him at the moment of his appearance in the balcony.
'There is always a skeleton in every fellow's cupboard, and Hawke Holcroft was the skeleton in mine, poor devil!' said Allan.
'You are still disposed to think and speak of him in the past tense?' observed Cameron, whose mind was made up as to his identity.
'I cannot do otherwise, but the moment the parade is dismissed we shall make inquiries at the hotel.'
They did so, but in vain. No person of that name or appearance was known there.
Instead of being put into the comfortable barracks of Kasr-el-Nil in the city, the Highland Brigade was kept in camp while October and November crept on, and this time was not entirely a peaceable one; for in the former month the Bedouins, who were greatly puzzled with their garb, and conceived them to be the English soldiers' wives all camped in one quarter, thought to make a dash there, and secure a few 'moon faces' to embellish their tents in the desert.