My abrupt sally seemed transfixing.  I might have been Medusa.  I had a welcome minute in which to contemplate the victims of my prowess and to exult unchristianly in their scars.  Then the tableau dissolved, the three men sprang up, and I took action.  As I emerged I had drawn out a handkerchief and I now proceeded to raise and wave it.

“Well, Herr von Blenheim, I have come to parley with you,” I announced, “white flag and all.”

He tried to look as if he had expected me, though it was obvious that he hadn’t.  To give verisimilitude to the pretense, he even pulled out his watch.

“I thought you would.  You had just two minutes’ grace,” he commented, watching me narrowly.  “Suppose you come down.  You have brought the papers, I hope—­for your own sake?”

“Oh, yes!” I assured him with all possible blandness.  “I have brought them.  What else was there to do?  You had us in the palm of your hand.  That door is old and worm-eaten; you could have crumpled it up like paper.  When we thought the situation over we saw its hopelessness at once; so here I am.”

“That is sensible,” he agreed curtly, though I could see that he was puzzled.  Casting a baffled glance beyond me, he scanned the gallery door.  It by no means merited my description, being heavy, solid, almost immovable in aspect.  “Well, let’s have the papers!” he said, with suspicion in his tone.

I descended in a deliberate manner, casting alert eyes about me, for, to use an expressive idiom, I was not doing this for my health.  On the contrary I had two very definite purposes; the first, which I could probably compass, was to save Miss Falconer from further intercourse with Blenheim and to conceal the presence of the wounded, helpless Firefly from his enemies; the second, surprisingly modest, was to make the four Germans prisoners and hand them over in triumph to the gendarmes of the nearest town, Santierre.

I was perfectly aware of the absurdity of this ambition.  I lacked the ghost of an idea of how to set about the thing.  But the general craziness of events had unhinged me.  I was forming the habit of trusting to pure luck and vogue la galere!  I can’t swear that I hadn’t visions of conquering all my adversaries in some miraculous single-handed fashion, disarming them, and, as a final sweet touch of revenge, tying them up in chairs, to keep Marie-Jeanne company and meditate on the turns of fate.

“Here they are,” I said, obligingly offering the package.  “We found them nestling behind a panel—­old family hiding place, you know.  I can’t vouch for their contents, not being an expert, but Miss Falconer was satisfied.  How about it, now you look at them?  Do they seem all right?”

Not paying the slightest attention to my conversational efforts, Blenheim had snatched the papers, torn them hungrily open, and run them through.  He was bristling with suspicion; but he evidently knew his business.  It did not take him long to conclude that he really had his spoils.