With the grim smile of one who, recognizing the end, neither flinches nor dallies, Martin fired two shots from his leveled revolver.

A half-second too late Benton’s magazine pistol ripped out in a frenzied series of spats.  The Englishman swayed slightly, his face crimson with blood, then, propping himself weakly against the wall, he fired one ineffectual shot in reply.  Slowly wilting at waist and knees, his figure slipped to the floor and lay shapelessly huddled near that of Karyl.  The stench of powder filled the room.  Twisting spirals of smoke curled ceilingward.

Von Ritz and Benton, kneeling at the King’s side, raised him from the floor.  The wounded man attempted to speak.  His eyes turned inquiringly toward the door of the other room.  Benton caught the questioning look and nodded his head.  Then Karyl settled back against the officer’s supporting shoulder after the fashion of a reassured child.

“The King is dead,” said Colonel Von Ritz quietly.  There was something very pathetic in the steady despair of his voice.

A door opened, and several Bedouins retreated shame-faced and cowed before a heavy Turk who wore the Sultan’s uniform.  His small, pig-like eyes blazed with terrifying wrath.  Looking about the room for a moment, he volcanically reviled them.

“You dogs!  You pigs!  You serpents!” he shrieked.  “Your hearts shall be thrown to the buzzards!  Your children dishonored!  You have dared to attack the foreign Pashas, and you—­Mohammed Abbas—!” The shopkeeper fell trembling to his knees.  “Your filthy shop shall be pulled down about your ears.  You make it a trap—­your feet shall be bastinadoed until you are a cripple for life!” Then his rage choked him, and, wheeling, he walked over to Benton, contemptuously kicking the prostrate body of Martin Effendi as he went.

From every pore Abdul Said Bey exuded sympathy and commiseration.  Scenting liberal backshish, he promised absolute secrecy for the affair, coupled with soothing assurances of private vengeance upon the surviving miscreants.  Also, he bewailed the disgrace which had fallen upon the Empire by reason of such infamy.  He presumed that the foreign gentlemen preferred secret punishment of the malefactors to a public sensation.  It should be so.

In his anxiety for Cara, Benton left Von Ritz to adjust matters with the Turk, who with profound courtesy and amazing promptness had closed carriages at a rear door, and caused his kavasses to clear the alley-way of prying eyes.

When the American reached the room where Cara had been left it was deserted by the assassin’s guards.  With a sudden stopping of his heart, he saw her lying apparently lifeless on a stacked-up pile of rugs.  In a terror that he scarcely dared to investigate, he laid his ear hesitantly to her breast, then, reassured, he gave thanks for the anesthetic of unconsciousness with which nature had blinded her to the tragedy beyond the closed door.