s I swept up to my goal, describing the
inevitable arc which I had no power to check, I saw that _one_ awaited
me.

Crouching forward half out of the open window was a Burmese dacoit, a
cross-eyed, leering being whom I well remembered to have encountered
two years before in my dealings with Dr. Fu-Manchu. One bare, sinewy
arm held rigidly at right angles before his breast, he clutched a long
curved knife and waited--waited--for the critical moment when my
throat should be at his mercy!

I have said that a strange coolness had come to my aid; even now it
did not fail me, and so incalculably rapid are the workings of the
human mind that I remembered complimenting myself upon an achievement
which Smith himself could not have bettered, and this in the
immeasurable interval which intervened between the commencement of my
upward swing and my arrival on a level with the window.

I threw my body back and thrust my feet forward. As my legs went
through the opening, an acute pain in one calf told me that I was not
to escape scathless from the night's melee. But the dacoit went
rolling over in the darkness of the room, as helpless in face of that
ramrod stroke as the veriest infant....

Back I swept upon my trapeze, a sight to have induced any passing
citizen to question his sanity. With might and main I sought to check
the swing of the pendulum, for if I should come within reach of the
window behind I doubted not that other knives awaited me. It was no
difficult feat, and I succeeded in checking my flight. Swinging there
above Museum Street I could even appreciate, so lucid was my mind, the
ludicrous element of the situation.

I dropped. My wounded leg almost failed me; and greatly shaken, but
with no other serious damage, I picked myself up from the dust of the
roadway--to see the bar vanishing into the darkness above. It was a
mockery of Fate that the problem which Nayland Smith had set me to
solve should have been solved thus: for I could not doubt that by
means of the branch of a tall tree or some other suitable object
situated opposite to Smith's house in Rangoon, Karamaneh had made her
escape as to-night I had made mine.

Apart from the acute pain in my calf I knew that the dacoit's knife
had bitten deeply by reason of the fact that a warm liquid was
trickling down into my boot. Like any drunkard I stood there in the
middle of the road looking up at the vacant window where the dacoit
had been, and up at the window a