Another second and Roy, sword in hand, had disappeared down it also, remembering as he ran a certain little fretted marble balcony which gave on the gardens below.  For Roy, of course, knew every turn of the Bala Hissar.  This balcony opened onto an unused gallery room.  To gain this, bolt the heavy door behind him, and so, secure from interruption, set to work twining a rope from strips torn from his turban and waistband did not take long; but it was a good twenty minutes before he had knotted all fast; though while he worked he thought of nothing else; of nothing but somehow reaching the garden.  Once there he would face the next difficulty.  One was enough at a time.  And then, when he had made the rope fast to one of the marble pillars and slid down it, it proved too short.  He swung with his feet just touching the topmost branch of a blossoming peach tree.  There was nothing for it but to let go, snatch at the branches as he fell and trust to chance for safety.  He found it; and dropped to the ground amid a perfect shower of shed peach petals.

So he stood for an instant to consider what must come next.  A gate!  Aye! but which?  The farthest from the point of attack would be the best, as there would be less vigilance there.  That meant the Delhi gate, and meant also a long round; yet he must be quick, for already there was a faint lightening of the eastern sky.  But the moon had set and the shadows, always darker in the hour before dawn, lay upon all things.

And luckily he knew every turn of the Bala Hissar garden, knew every point where danger might be expected.  So he began to make his way carefully.  He dodged more than one sentry by creeping on through the bushes while the man passed away from him, and crouched among them, still as a mouse, while the measured march came toward him.  And once he had to run for bare life from a shower of arrows which a company of soldiers sent into the darkness after a suspicious rustling in the bushes.  But mostly the men on duty had too much to think of outside the walls to trouble themselves much about the things inside them.

So with doublings and turnings he came at last on the Delhi gate, a small, round, flat-roofed building pierced by a high archway.  It was too dark for him to see its outline, but he knew it well, and paused against the outside wall to consider what he had to do next.  The place seemed almost deserted, but a glimmer of light from the archway and the even tramp of a sentry’s footstep told it was not all unguarded.

What was he to do?  It would be useless for him to try and steal past the sentry, as the gate beyond must be locked, or at any rate bolted and barred.  He must either, therefore, try and overpower the man or else try to gain the flat roof by the stairs—­of which he knew the position—­and, trusting to find a rope or something of the sort in the upper room of the gate, let himself down into the ditch outside.

Now, Roy was a well-grown lad of nigh fifteen, tall for his age, and with his light, youthful sinews of iron might well be a match for many a man, especially as his purpose was like steel, and that is ever half the battle.  But there was the chance of other soldiers being within call, and that might mean failure.  Now, that must not be.  Roy had to succeed—­he must!