narrow passage, hot, fetid, and blacker than the wholesome night
without, crooked about sharp corners, that bruised the wanderer's hands
and arms. Suddenly he fell down a short flight of slimy steps, landing
in noisome mud at the bottom of some crypt. A trap, a suffocating well,
he thought; and rose filthy, choked with bitterness and disgust. Only
the taunting justice of Wutzler's argument, the retort _ad hominem_, had
sent him headlong into this dangerous folly. He had scolded a coward
with hasty words, and been forced to follow where they led. To this
loathsome hole. Behind him, a door closed, a bar scraped softly into
place. Before him, as he groped in rage and self-reproach, rose a vault
of solid plaster, narrow as a chimney.

But presently, glancing upward, he saw a small cluster of stars
blinking, voluptuous, immeasurably overhead. Their pittance of light, as
his eyesight cleared, showed a ladder rising flat against the wall. He
reached up, grasped the bamboo rungs, hoisted with an acrobatic wrench,
and began to climb cautiously.

Above, faint and muffled, sounded a murmur of voices.

CHAPTER XI

WHITE LOTUS

He was swarming up, quiet as a thief, when his fingers clawed the bare
plaster. The ladder hung from the square end of a protruding beam, above
which there were no more rungs. He hung in doubt.

Then, to his great relief, something blacker than the starlight gathered
into form over his head,--a slanting bulk, which gradually took on a
familiar meaning. He chuckled, reached for it, and fingering the rough
edge to avoid loose tiles, hauled himself up to a foothold on the beam,
and so, flinging out his arms and hooking one knee, scrambled over and
lay on a ribbed and mossy surface, under the friendly stars. The outcast
and his strange brethren had played fair: this was the long roof, and
close ahead rose the wall of some higher building, an upright blackness
from which escaped two bits of light,--a right angle of hairbreadth
lines, and below this a brighter patch, small and ragged. Here, louder,
but confused with a gentle scuffing of feet, sounded the voices of the
rival lodge.

Toward these he crawled, stopping at every creak of the tiles. Once a
broken roll snapped off, and slid rattling down the roof. He sat up,
every muscle ready for the sudden leap and shove that would send him
sliding after it into the lower darkness. It fell but a short distance,
into something soft. Gradually he relaxed, bu