hand to work with,
particularly when you are obliged to keep an eye on a mysterious prisoner
of whose character you are ignorant; and it was several minutes before
the job was done.

"You will go to that corner;" and the Servian translated for his
prisoner's benefit with a gesture of the revolver.

"Anything to please you, worthy fellow," replied Armitage, and he obeyed
with amiable alacrity. The man's object was to get him as far from the
inner door as possible while he called help from above, which was, of
course, the wise thing from his point of view, as Armitage recognized.

Armitage stood with his back against a rack of pots; the table was at his
left and beyond it the door opening upon the court; a barred window was
at his right; opposite him was another door that communicated with the
interior of the house and disclosed the lower steps of a rude stairway
leading upward. The Servian now closed and locked the outer kitchen door
with care.

Armitage had lost his hat in the area; his light walking-stick lay in the
middle of the floor; his inverness coat hung wet and bedraggled about
him; his shirt was crumpled and soiled. But his air of good humor and his
tame acceptance of capture seemed to increase the Servian's caution, and
he backed away toward the inner door with his revolver still pointed at
Armitage's head.

He began calling lustily up the narrow stair-well in Servian, changing in
a moment to German. He made a ludicrous figure, as he held his revolver
at arm's length, craning his neck into the passage, and howling until he
was red in the face. He paused to listen, then renewed his cries, while
Armitage, with his back against the rack of pots, studied the room and
made his plans.

"There is a thief here! I have caught a thief!" yelled the Servian, now
exasperated by the silence above. Then, as he relaxed a moment and turned
to make sure that his revolver still covered Armitage, there was a sudden
sound of steps above and a voice bawled angrily down the stairway:

"Zmai, stop your noise and tell me what's the trouble."

It was the voice of Durand speaking in the Servian dialect; and Zmai
opened his mouth to explain.

As the big fellow roared his reply Armitage snatched from the rack a
heavy iron boiling-pot, swung it high by the bail with both hands and let
it fly with all his might at the Servian's head, upturned in the
earnestness of his bawling. On the instant the revolver roared loudly in
the nar