decreasing speed, toward the vague oblong of the open window beyond.

I hope I have been successful, in some measure, in portraying the varied
emotions which it was my lot to experience that night, and it may well
seem that nothing more exquisite could remain for me. Yet it was written
otherwise; for as 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 remember 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
scatheless 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. 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 tonight I had made mine.

Apart from the acute pain in my calf I knew that th