ysius' ear of the house; if there was any movement
about the place, here if anywhere it would be detected and its source
determined.

The floor was of hardwood, and my feet were soon numb with cold. Then,
too, bravery is a relative term when all is said and done. A coward
may be always a coward, but it is not an inevitable corollary that a
brave man is always brave. To know a possible antagonist, to walk
boldly up to him in the broad light of day, is one thing; to stand in a
hyperborean hall in the dead of the night, surrounded by the darkness
of the pit, ignorant alike of the nature of your peril and the point
from which an attack may come--that is quite another.

So I freely own that my jaws ached with the effort of keeping my teeth
from clicking together like castanets.

In the course of a long and not uneventful career, I have been in a
good many tight places and under all sorts of conditions where I had to
hold myself to the matter in hand with every grain of will power that I
could muster; but never since that night in the old Page hall have I
experienced precisely the same unnerving feeling that possessed me
then. I came perilously close to an ignominious retreat--and before
ever I had an idea of what I was running from!

Fortunately for whatever status I may hold in this chronicle, the
movement was checked at its inception. In a flash my momentary panic
was forgotten. I caught a sound that I recognized and, moreover,
located on the instant. It was the long, unmistakable creak of a loose
stair plank such as follows the gradual shifting of a person's weight
from one foot to another. Somebody was slowly and cautiously ascending
the rear stairs.

I could smile once more and breathe normally. Instead of retreating, I
was in the next few seconds stealing up the front stairs. Nor did I
move very slowly, either. I knew by experiment that its steps were all
solid, and that I need not fear the betrayal of any complaining board.

At the stair head I became cautious again; I did n't want to risk a
collision with the _etagere_. What must I do, however, but stumble
against the topmost step and plunge head foremost right into the thing.

The ensuing crash that filled the house was like an explosion. It also
drowned my comments. To make matters worse, in my efforts to keep from
falling, my revolver shot from my hand and through the balusters, and
went clattering down to the landing with the noise of a falli