thin reach
of his hand. In his grasp, was the oily, thick queue of a coolie.

And suddenly, as he groped, the wall spat out angry tongues of
corrosive red flame.

A white-hot iron seemed to shoot through the flesh of his left arm.
The pain reached his shoulder. His left arm was useless--the bone
cracked!

Groaning, he pushed himself back. His knees struck the sill, slid
over, and he felt the coarse, peeled paint of the veranda. He reached
the ledge--dropped to the ground, and in dropping, the revolver spilled
from his hand as it caught on a projecting ledge of the floor, bounded
off into the darkness.

He groveled to retrieve it, muttering as his hands probed through the
tufted grass.

Light glimmered in the room above. There occurred sounds of a
struggle, of feet scraping, a muffled oath, a short scream.

Peter leaped back, looking up, prepared to dash for the road.

A yellow light within the room silhouetted the slender figure of Romola
Borria against the French window. Her arms went out in frantic appeal
to the darkness, to him.

"Wait!" she cried in an awful voice. "I love you! Wait!"

At that confession, a hand seemingly suspended in space was elevated
slowly behind her. The hand paused high above her head. A face
appeared in the luminous space above her head, an evil face, carved
with a hideous brutality, wearing an ominous snarl; and above the
writhing lips of this one was a black growth, a mustache, pointed, like
twin black daggers.

Emiguel Borria, ardent tool of the Gray Dragon? Emiguel Borria,
husband of the girl Romola?

Emiguel Borria, in whose lifting hand Peter now caught the glint of a
revolver, attempted to crowd the girl to one side. But she held her
ground, and then this woman who had on a half-dozen successive
occasions tricked and deceived Peter, who had deliberately and on her
own confession lured him into this trap, upset, womanlike, the
elaborate plan of her master.

In a frenzy she spun upon Emiguel Borria, seized the white barrel of
the revolver in her two hands and forced it against his side. Tiny red
flames spurted out on either side of the cylinder and smeared in a
smoky circle where the muzzle was momentarily buried in the tangled
black coat. And Emiguel Borria seemed to sink into the great room and
entirely out of Peter's sight.

Romola leaned far into the darkness.

"Run! Run! For your life!"

And as Peter started to run, out of the compound for the du