rats all at once was merely a fancy, and that everything was all right.  Rodriguez saw a rope coming slowly down from the ceiling, he quickly determined whether it was a rope or only the shadow of some huge spider’s thread, and then he watched it and saw it come down right over his bed and stop within a few feet of it.  Rodriguez looked up cautiously to see who had sent him that strange addition to the portents that troubled the chamber, but the ceiling was too high and dim for him to perceive anything but the rope coming down out of the darkness.  Yet he surmised that the ceiling must have softly opened, without any sound at all, at the moment that he heard the greater number of rats.  He waited then to see what the rope would do; and at first it hung as still as the great festoons dead spiders had made in the corners; then as he watched it it began to sway.  He looked up into the dimness then to see who was swaying the rope; and for a long time, as it seemed to him lying gripping his Castilian sword on the floor he saw nothing clearly.  And then he saw mine host coming down the rope, hand over hand quite nimbly, as though he lived by this business.  In his right hand he held a poniard of exceptional length, yet he managed to clutch the rope and hold the poniard all the time with the same hand.

If there had been something hideous about the shadow of the spider that came down from that height the shadow of mine host was indeed demoniac.  He too was like a spider, with his body at no time slender all bunched up on the rope, and his shadow was six times his size:  you could turn from the spider’s shadow to the spider and see that it was for the most part a fancy of the candle half crazed by the draughts, but to turn from mine host’s shadow to himself and to see his wicked eyes was to say that the candle’s wildest fears were true.  So he climbed down his rope holding his poniard upward.  But when he came within perhaps ten feet of the bed he pointed it downward and began to sway about.  It will be readily seen that by swaying his rope at a height mine host could drop on any part of the bed.  Rodriguez as he watched him saw him scrutinise closely and continue to sway on his rope.  He feared that mine host was ill satisfied with the look of the mandolin and that he would climb away again, well warned of his guest’s astuteness, into the heights of the ceiling to devise some fearfuller scheme; but he was only looking for the shoulder.  And then mine host dropped; poniard first, he went down with all his weight behind it and drove it through the bolster below where the shoulder should be, just where we slant our arms across our bodies, when we lie asleep on our sides, leaving the ribs exposed:  and the soft bed received him.  And the moment that mine host let go of his rope Rodriguez leaped to his feet.  He saw Rodriguez, indeed their eyes met as he dropped through the air, but what could mine host do?  He was already committed to his stroke, and his poniard was already deep in the mattress when the good Castilian blade passed through his ribs.