From the darkness below a figure rose up to receive him with a grip like iron.  Billy’s right arm was doubled at his side; the blade of that villainous old dagger was pressed against the yielding softness of the fellow’s sash, but for the life of him Billy could not drive home that knife against the human flesh.  With a convulsive movement he tore himself from those gorilla arms and sent up a desperate kick, then leaped past the staggering man, and with the unused knife in his teeth, he tore at the bars of the great gate in the wall at his left.  The bars were stiff and primitive and resisted his furious fingers, and the big gate-keeper, gasping for a moment against the stairs, suddenly straightened and sprang toward him.

“Here’s one hero that didn’t open the door ’in the nick of time’!” raced through Billy’s grimly humorous mind, as he dodged the savage thrust of a knife the man had drawn and turned and scuttled across the court with the other on his heels.  Through the arches he darted and then down into the garden, sprinting as he had never sprinted before, on, on to the southwest angles of the wall, thanking Heaven fervently, as every step outdistanced his pursuer, that the man had evidently no gun.

The rope ladder was still there, blown free at the bottom now and waving merrily in the wind.  He snatched at it, dropping his knife in his pocket, praying that the top hooks had not become dislodged, and after him came the other man, hand over hand.  Billy drew up his legs in a horrid fear of having them gripped or hacked at, and gained the top just as the other’s head appeared below, his knife gleaming in his teeth.

Like a flash Billy drew out his knife and cut the rope.  There was a wild yell from below and a screech of curses and imprecations following a rather sickening sounding thud, which persuaded Billy, peering down from above, that the victim’s lungs at least were unimpaired, and then to his great amazement a shot went winging up past his ear.

“Had a gun all the time—­too fighting mad to think of it—­knife more natural!” he thought amazedly, sliding down the other side in a jiffy and then jerking his ladder down flat on the ground.

Out in the shadows the one-eyed man was paddling earnestly to safety.  The shot so close at hand had been his sign for departure; he did not look back at Billy’s shrill whistling nor his wilder shouts, and as the yells on the other side of the wall were bringing the inmates of the palace upon him, Billy had no more time for persuasion.

Off went his shoes and out into the canal he flung them, then headlong he plunged into the dark and uninviting water and struck out to the right, in the same direction in which the canoe was going, keeping carefully in the shadow of the bank, on the other side.

In a few moments the canoe was lost from sight and Billy was left alone, swimming between two steep walls of old palaces, weighed down by his tweeds, and maddened through and through with his inability to wring the neck of the one-eyed canoeist.  The distance seemed unending to his slow progress but at last the palms of the cemetery appeared upon the right hand bank, and he struck across the widening waters and climbed out on the first foot of the graveyard that presented itself.