ight was a door leading from the balcony into the building. It
was at the end of an unlighted hall, and on the impulse of the moment I
stepped within. The hall was broad and led straight through to the
front of the building. On either side were the doorways of the various
apartments which lined it.

I had no more than entered the corridor than I saw the three warriors
at the other end--those whom I had just seen leaving the apartment.
Then a turn to the right took them from my sight again. Quickly I
hastened along the hallway in pursuit. My gait was reckless, but I
felt that Fate had been kind indeed to throw such an opportunity within
my grasp, and I could not afford to allow it to elude me now.

At the far end of the corridor I found a spiral stairway leading to the
floors above and below. The three had evidently left the floor by this
avenue. That they had gone down and not up I was sure from my
knowledge of these ancient buildings and the methods of the Warhoons.

I myself had once been a prisoner of the cruel hordes of northern
Warhoon, and the memory of the underground dungeon in which I lay still
is vivid in my memory. And so I felt certain that Tars Tarkas lay in
the dark pits beneath some nearby building, and that in that direction
I should find the trail of the three warriors leading to his cell.

Nor was I wrong. At the bottom of the runway, or rather at the landing
on the floor below, I saw that the shaft descended into the pits
beneath, and as I glanced down the flickering light of a torch revealed
the presence of the three I was trailing.

Down they went toward the pits beneath the structure, and at a safe
distance behind I followed the flicker of their torch. The way led
through a maze of tortuous corridors, unlighted save for the wavering
light they carried. We had gone perhaps a hundred yards when the party
turned abruptly through a doorway at their right. I hastened on as
rapidly as I dared through the darkness until I reached the point at
which they had left the corridor. There, through an open door, I saw
them removing the chains that secured the great Thark, Tars Tarkas, to
the wall.

Hustling him roughly between them, they came immediately from the
chamber, so quickly in fact that I was near to being apprehended. But
I managed to run along the corridor in the direction I had been going
in my pursuit of them far enough to be without the radius of their
meagre light as they emerge