Nor was Ephraim the only new arrival.  Man after man came down backward after him, each man cursed richly for treading on his predecessor’s fingers—­a seeming endless chain of men that did not cease when the room was already uncomfortably overcrowded.  Some of these men wore clothes that suggested Russia, but the majority were in rags.  The ladder swayed and creaked under them, and finally, at a word from Ephraim, the last-comers sat on the upper rungs, bending the frail thing with their weight into a complaining loop.

Several of the newcomers had torches, and their acrid smoke turned the twice-breathed air of the place into evil-tasting fog.

Three men put their faces close to Ephraim’s and proceeded to enlighten him as to what had passed.  He seemed to be recognized as some sort of chieftain, and carried himself with a commanding air, but so many men talked at once, and all in Armenian, that we could not pick out more than a word or two here and there.  Even Fred, with his gift of tongues, could hardly make head or tail of it.

We three pressed through the swarm and took our stand beside Gloria, not hesitating to thrust the other women aside.  They dragged at their men-folk to call attention to us, but the argument was too hot to be missed, and the women clawed and screamed in vain.

“I believe we could get out!” I shouted in Will’s ear.  But he shook his head.  At least six men were standing on the trap, and we could not have driven them off it because there was no other space on the floor that they could occupy.  So I turned to Fred.

“Couldn’t we shake those ruffians off the ladder, and climb up it and escape?” I shouted.  But Fred shook his head, and went on listening, trying to follow the course of the dispute.

At last somebody with louder lungs than any other man made Ephraim understand that it was I who sent the messenger to Zeitoon.  Instantly that solved the problem to his mind.  I should be hanged, and that would be all about it.  He gesticulated.  The men swarmed down off the ladder to the already overcrowded floor, and mistaking Will for me several men started to thrust him forward.  A face appeared through the hole in the roof and its owner was sent running for a rope.  I had not recovered my pistol, and my rifle was slung at my back where I could not possibly get at it for the crowd.  But Fred had a Colt repeater handy in his hip-pocket and he promptly screwed the muzzle of it into Ephraim’s ear.  What he said to him I don’t know, but Ephraim’s convictions underwent a change of base and he began to yell for silence.  The men who had seized Will let go of him just as the rope with a disgusting noose in the end was lowered through the roof.  And then Ossa was imposed on Pelion.

A new face appeared at the hole.  Not that we could see the face.  We could only see the form of a man who shook the bloody stump of a forearm at us, and shrieked unintelligible things.  After thirty seconds even the men in the far corner were aware of him, and then there was stony silence while he had his say.  He repeated his message a dozen times, as if he had it by heart exactly, spitting foam out of his mouth and never ceasing to shake the butchered stump of an arm.  At about the dozenth time he fainted and fell headlong down the ladder bringing up on the shoulders of the men below.