e center of the room above,
looking about with keen, pig-like eyes, as he gave rapid commands to a
half dozen Arabs of villainous visage.

"You, Sayed Ayoub," he ordered, "take your pig of a self and others like
unto you into that doorway by the stairs. Remain until you hear men
enter from these two doors, facing the Infidel dogs. Then come upon them
from behind. The man is to be bound, and when evening comes--but that is
later! Still, if he resists too much--" The speaker shrugged his heavy
shoulders and made a certain gesture.

"And the woman? What of her?" The question came from a gigantic Bedouin
whose evil countenance was made the more sinister by one closed and
empty eye-socket.

Abdul Said _Bey_ nodded. "She is to be tenderly handled," he enjoined.
"She, also, must disappear, but that shall be my care. My harem is as
silent as the Bosphorus."

There were steps on the stairs, and instantaneously the room emptied
itself and became silently dark.

When Karyl heard the hand-clapping of the decoy shopman, and saw the
responding ruffians in the opposite doors, he swiftly thrust the girl
into the spot of blacker shadow at his back, and seized the wrist of
Mohammed Abbas with a force and suddenness that wrung from him a piteous
wail.

Keeping the Turk before him, he backed toward the shadowed recess, with
the one idea of shielding Cara. But the darker spot was the door behind
which Sayed Ayoub lay in ambuscade, and as Karyl reached it, it swung
open, showing them against a background as bright as though they were
painted on yellow canvas.

With his free arm he swept Cara into the doorway, wheeling quickly in
front of her, and sent Mohammed Abbas lurching forward into the faces of
the assailants led by Sayed Ayoub. Instantly, however, his arms were
pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically
struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick
fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down
stifled and garroted into insensibility.

Seeing the man overwhelmed and dragged through the door, Cara stood
rigidly upright, white in the intensity of voiceless outrage, until the
gigantic brute with one sightless eye and a greasy _tarboosh_ reached
out his grimy hand and seized her. Then she sickened at the profaning
shock of his touch, and fell unconscious.

A few moments later the "English Jackal" stood nonchalantly looking down
at the bound figure of the forme