ing on a table in front of and to the left
of Ingolby seized a horseshoe hanging on the wall, and flung it with an
oath.

It caught Ingolby in the forehead, and he fell to the floor without a
sound.

A minute afterwards the bar was empty, save for Osterhaut, Jowett, old
Barbazon, and his assistants.

Barbazon and Jowett lifted the motionless figure in their arms, and
carried it into a little room.

Then Osterhaut picked up the horseshoe tied with its gay blue ribbons,
now stained with blood, and put it in his pocket.

"For luck," he said.

CHAPTER XI. THE SENTENCE OF THE PATRIN

Fleda waked suddenly, but without motion; just a wide opening of the
eyes upon the darkness, and a swift beating of the heart, but not the
movement of a muscle. It was as though some inward monitor, some gnome
of the hidden life had whispered of danger to her slumbering spirit. The
waking was a complete emergence, a vigilant and searching attention.

There was something on her breast weighing it down, yet with a pressure
which was not weight alone, and maybe was not weight at all as weight
is understood. Instantly there flashed through her mind the primitive
belief that a cat will lie upon the breasts of children and suck their
breath away. Strange and even absurd as it was, it seemed to her that
a cat was pressing and pressing down upon her breast. There could be no
mistaking the feline presence. Now with a sudden energy of the body, she
threw the Thing from her, and heard it drop, with the softness of feline
feet, on the Indian rug upon the floor.

Then she sprang out of bed, and, feeling for the matches, lit a candle
on the small table beside her bed, and moved it round searching for what
she thought to be a cat. It was not to be seen. She looked under the
bed; it was not there: under the washstand, under the chest of drawers,
under the improvised dressing-table; and no cat was to be found. She
173 looked under the chair over which hung her clothes, even behind the
dresses and the Indian deerskin cape hanging on the door.

There was no life of any kind save her own in the room, so far as she
could see. She laughed nervously, though her heart was still beating
hard. That it should beat hard was absurd, for what had she to fear--she
who had lived the wild open-air life of many lands, had slept among
hills infested by animals the enemy of man, and who when a little girl
had faced beasts of prey alone. Yet here in her own safe r