The Servian half turned toward his prisoner, the revolver in his left hand, while with the fingers of his right he felt laboriously for a lamp that had been revealed by the fitful flashes of the matches.  It is not an easy matter to light a lamp when you have only one hand to work with, particularly when you are obliged to keep an eye on a mysterious prisoner of whose character you are ignorant; and it was several minutes before the job was done.

“You will go to that corner;” and the Servian translated for his prisoner’s benefit with a gesture of the revolver.

“Anything to please you, worthy fellow,” replied Armitage, and he obeyed with amiable alacrity.  The man’s object was to get him as far from the inner door as possible while he called help from above, which was, of course, the wise thing from his point of view, as Armitage recognized.

Armitage stood with his back against a rack of pots; the table was at his left and beyond it the door opening upon the court; a barred window was at his right; opposite him was another door that communicated with the interior of the house and disclosed the lower steps of a rude stairway leading upward.  The Servian now closed and locked the outer kitchen door with care.

Armitage had lost his hat in the area; his light walking-stick lay in the middle of the floor; his inverness coat hung wet and bedraggled about him; his shirt was crumpled and soiled.  But his air of good humor and his tame acceptance of capture seemed to increase the Servian’s caution, and he backed away toward the inner door with his revolver still pointed at Armitage’s head.

He began calling lustily up the narrow stair-well in Servian, changing in a moment to German.  He made a ludicrous figure, as he held his revolver at arm’s length, craning his neck into the passage, and howling until he was red in the face.  He paused to listen, then renewed his cries, while Armitage, with his back against the rack of pots, studied the room and made his plans.

“There is a thief here!  I have caught a thief!” yelled the Servian, now exasperated by the silence above.  Then, as he relaxed a moment and turned to make sure that his revolver still covered Armitage, there was a sudden sound of steps above and a voice bawled angrily down the stairway: 

“Zmai, stop your noise and tell me what’s the trouble.”

It was the voice of Durand speaking in the Servian dialect; and Zmai opened his mouth to explain.

As the big fellow roared his reply Armitage snatched from the rack a heavy iron boiling-pot, swung it high by the bail with both hands and let it fly with all his might at the Servian’s head, upturned in the earnestness of his bawling.  On the instant the revolver roared loudly in the narrow kitchen and Armitage seized the brass lamp and flung it from him upon the hearth, where it fell with a great clatter without exploding.

It was instantly pitch dark.  The Servian had gone down like a felled ox and Armitage at the threshold leaped over him into the hall past the rear stairs down which the men were stumbling, cursing volubly as they came.