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 the dacoit’s knife had bitten deeply, by reason of the fact that a warm liquid was trickling down into my boot.  Like any drunkard I stood there in the middle of the road looking up at the vacant window where the dacoit had been, and up at the window above the shop of J. Salaman where I knew Fu-Manchu to be.  But for some reason the latter window had been closed or almost closed, and as I stood there this reason became apparent to me.

The sound of running footsteps came from the direction of New Oxford Street.  I turned—­to see two policemen bearing down upon me!