I had not proceeded half a dozen yards when my hand touched a bare leg, and I drew back hastily.  With madly pounding heart I crouched in the dust, waiting for an attack, but as I waited I convinced myself that the leg had not been drawn back when my fingers encountered it.  With my right hand clubbing my revolver, I reached my left out cautiously, and once again my fingers came in contact with the bare limb.  The fear left me at that moment.  I was back at the spot where I had fired at an unseen foe some fifteen minutes before, and the body near me was the victim of my lucky bullet.

Carefully I felt the dead man.  He wore a large feather cloak and a tall headdress, and I concluded that he was one of the wriggling brutes whose performance we had watched in the cave.  In the dust, beside the body, my fingers found his revolver, and the fact that he had been armed at the moment his party came unexpectedly upon us was more proof, if proof were needed, that Leith’s tactics were anything but straightforward.

Securing the revolver, I started to crawl away, but a sudden inspiration came to me.  I stripped the parrot-feather mat and the headdress from the corpse and donned them over my own clothing.  In the darkness recognition was made through the fingers, and as there were eight enemies in the cavern and only one friend, I considered that the danger I ran of receiving a bullet from Holman was more than counterbalanced by the protection that the dancer’s costume would give me if I ran against the groping hands of Leith or his gang.

After a wearisome crawl I touched the wall of the cavern, and standing upright I debated for a moment whether I should move to the right or the left.  I had no definite idea as to the position of the opening through which we had entered the place, and I dreaded the weary circuit of the cavern which I would be compelled to make if I turned in the wrong direction.  It was possible that the corridor was within a few yards of me, and if I turned away from it I might get lost in other passages leading to the long gallery where the dance of death had taken place.

I decided to move to the right, and with one hand upon the cold wall I stumbled forward.  If Holman was still a prisoner, Edith Herndon and her sister were entirely unprotected, and my tormenting imagination made me throw prudence to the winds.  I had to reach the camp before Leith or any of his evil bodyguard arrived, and, becoming reckless of the terrors of the dark, I ran blindly in my desperate desire to find the path into the open air.

I cannoned into a man who was standing with his back to the wall of the cave, and before I could lift my arm his fingers had gripped my throat.  For a second we struggled, then he released his grip and murmured some words in a dialect that I did not understand.  His hand had touched the parrot-feather mat that I had drawn about my shoulders, and he was convinced that I was one of his own companions.