resolution, I was going mad.

Another fiery drop--and another!

I touched a rotting wooden post and slimy timbers. I had reached one
bound of my watery prison. More fire fell from above, and the scream
of hysteria quivered, unuttered, in my throat.

Keeping myself afloat with increasing difficulty in my heavy garments,
I threw my head back and raised my eyes.

No more drops fell, and no more drops would fall; but it was merely a
question of time for the floor to collapse. For it was beginning to
emit a dull, red glow.

The room above me was in flames!

It was drops of burning oil from the lamp, finding passage through the
cracks in the crazy flooring, which had fallen about me--for the death
trap had reclosed, I suppose, mechanically.

My saturated garments were dragging me down, and now I could hear the
flames hungrily eating into the ancient rottenness overhead. Shortly
that cauldron would be loosed upon my head. The glow of the flames
grew brighter . . . and showed me the half-rotten piles upholding the
building, showed me the tidal mark upon the slime-coated walls--showed
me that there was no escape!

By some subterranean duct the foul place was fed from the Thames. By
that duct, with the outgoing tide, my body would pass, in the wake of
Mason, Cadby, and many another victim!

Rusty iron rungs were affixed to one of the walls communicating with a
trap--but the bottom three were missing!

Brighter and brighter grew the awesome light the light of what should
be my funeral pyre--reddening the oily water and adding a new dread to
the whispering, clammy horror of the pit. But something it showed
me . . . a projecting beam a few feet above the water . . . and directly
below the iron ladder!

"Merciful Heaven!" I breathed. "Have I the strength?"

A desire for laughter claimed me with sudden, all but irresistible
force. I knew what it portended and fought it down--grimly, sternly.

My garments weighed upon me like a suit of mail; with my chest aching
dully, my veins throbbing to bursting, I forced tired muscles to work,
and, every stroke an agony, approached the beam. Nearer I swam
. . . nearer. Its shadow fell black upon the water, which now had all
the seeming of a pool of blood. Confused sounds--a remote uproar--came
to my ears. I was nearly spent . . . I was in the shadow of the beam! If
I could throw up one arm. . .

A shrill scream sounded far above me!

"Petrie! Petrie!" (That voice