Rudolph obeyed, and, running at top speed, dimly understood that he had doubled round a squad of grunting runners, whose bare feet pattered close by him in the smoke.  Before him gaped a black square, through which he darted, to pitch head first over some fat, padded bulk.  As he rose, the rasping of rough jute against his cheek told him that he had fallen among bales; and a familiar, musty smell, that the bales were his own, in his own go-down, across a narrow lane from the nunnery.  With high hopes, he stumbled farther into the darkness.  Once, among the bales, he trod on a man’s hand, which was silently pulled away.  With no time to think of that, he crawled and climbed over the disordered heaps, groping toward the other door.  He had nearly reached it, when torchlight flared behind him, rushing in, and savage cries, both shrill and guttural, rang through the stuffy warehouse.  He had barely time, in the reeling shadows, to fall on the earthen floor, and crawl under a thin curtain of reeds to a new refuge.

Into this—­a cubby-hole where the compradore kept his tally-slips, umbrella, odds and ends—­the torchlight shone faintly through the reeds.  Lying flat behind a roll of matting, Rudolph could see, as through the gauze twilight of a stage scene, the tossing lights and the skipping men who shouted back and forth, jabbing their spears or pikes down among the bales, to probe the darkness.  Their search was wild but thorough.  Before it, in swift retreat, some one crawled past the compradore’s room, brushing the splint partition like a snake.  This, as Rudolph guessed, might be the man whose hand he had stepped on.

The stitches in the curtain became beads of light.  A shadowy arm heaved up, fell with a dry, ripping sound and a vertical flash.  A sword had cut the reeds from top to bottom.

Through the rent a smoking flame plunged after the sword, and after both, a bony yellow face that gleamed with sweat.  Rudolph, half wrapped in his matting, could see the hard, glassy eyes shine cruelly in their narrow slits; but before they lowered to meet his own, a jubilant yell resounded in the go-down, and with a grunt, the yellow face, the flambeau, and the sword were snatched away.

He lay safe, but at the price of another man’s peril.  They had caught the crawling fugitive, and now came dragging him back to the lights.  Through the tattered curtain Rudolph saw him flung on the ground like an empty sack, while his captors crowded about in a broken ring, cackling, and prodding him with their pikes.  Some jeered, some snarled, others called him by name, with laughing epithets that rang more friendly, or at least more jocular; but all bent toward him eagerly, and flung down question after question, like a little band of kobolds holding an inquisition.  At some sharper cry than the rest, the fellow rose to his knees and faced them boldly.  A haggard Christian, he was being fairly given his last chance to recant.