h lay that fatal pole. It lay along the shadow of
a column, but its end protruded beyond that shadow and would surely
catch his eye. Billy tried to free his right hand to get at a gun of
his own. To be caught ridiculously like this, clutching like a
monkey on a stick----!

Another man, shorter and bent, in a long robe and carrying a
lantern, now emerged from that door along whose closed edge Billy
had noticed the crack of light, and the Nubian diverged toward him.
The pole was unnoticed and the two joined forces and made a slow
circle in the garden. Billy remembered that dangling rope, and with
a thumping heart he hoped that it would hang unregarded in that
shadowed angle, overrun with vines.

Apparently it did, for he heard the footsteps passing on without a
stop as he clung there to his grating, his muscles cramped, his
sockets strained. Slowly the two recrossed the hall, talking
together in low gutturals and not apparently of unpleasant things,
for a note of laughter sounded. They lingered in parley in the
court, but by the time that he thought that he could not hang on a
minute longer and would drop like a peach from the wall, they
separated and each moved slowly away. The man with the lantern shut
the door after him and all was darkness there and the great Nubian
was blotted out beneath the arches of the vestibule.

The fear that Falconer was in the palace alone made Billy desperate.
Clinging with his feet and his left hand, he drew out a clasp knife
with a razor edge and hacked furiously at the delicate spindles and
frail carved work of the screen till he could thrust one arm through
the opening. The work was easier then, but he had to resist the
temptation to seize the brittle stuff and break it in pieces, for
fear the splintering sound would be too sharp.

Torn between caution and impatience he worked on, and as soon as the
hole was large enough he pulled himself cautiously up and dropped
over the edge into the cage-like balcony on the other side. The
panel which separated it from the rest of the old room was half
open, and he stepped through it into what appeared utter darkness.

He stood listening keenly, for he knew that he was standing below
the rose room; the very spot where he was must be almost exactly
beneath that secret passage outside the panel in the rose room's
wall. Not a sound came down to him and he dared not wait longer, but
turned to the left and passed through the arched doorway into the