"Sir," shouted Popham, leveling a forefinger at me, "I shall see you properly jailed for this. Why, you miserable footpad, I can——" "Save your breath," I interrupted tartly, meeting his forefinger with the muzzle of the pepper box. "Lead is no respecter of persons. One of you has called me a dangerous man. I am all of that, and desperate. Mr. Popham, you saw how Mr. Gilhooly carried out my orders. You will proceed in the same manner, and without further loss of time. In five minutes I must be out of here." He started to argue the point with me, and I allowed my forefinger to flex, ever so slightly, upon the trigger. That was enough. A man values his life in a direct ratio with what he considers his importance; therefore, the esteem in which these four millionaires held themselves must have been overwhelming. The Honorable Augustus Popham finally yielded up his personal property with the same readiness that had characterized his friend. Hannibal Markham followed him, and after Markham came J. Archibald Meigs. I had a pleasant word for each as I marshaled the four bundles, strung them on the fingers of my left hand and backed toward the door, which was a few paces behind me. "When a good general beats a retreat," said I, preparing to pull open the door and let myself out, "he places as many obstacles in the path of the pursuing force as possible. When I leave, therefore, I shall lock this door on the outside." I was watched by the plutocrats in philosophical silence; by the professor, with a geniality that nothing seemed able to shake. I had spared Quinn because he was a friend of the poor, as I had discovered. And I had been poor myself some fifteen minutes back. "Good-by," said I airily. "_Au revoir_," answered the professor. "Look well where you step." I threw open the door with a laugh. The laugh faded into a shout of terror. I threw out my hands, revolver and packets of loot falling through the door, and I only barely saving myself with one foot over the threshold. The horror that gripped me then is such a horror as comes to a man but once in a lifetime. My brain sickened and chilled, my heart all but stopped its beating, and my limbs grew rigid. In the black of the fearsome night—not the atmospheric blue-black I had been accustomed to, but the ebony dark of Erebus—I saw a wild greenish star below, a huge disk whose gleaming nimbus danced on my sight in quivering lines. Half crazed, I flung back into the room and fell groveling to the floor, my ears echoing with the professor’s merriment and the startled exclamations of the four men I had robbed—all to no purpose. Presently I sat up, rubbing forehead and eyes. The professor stood in the open door, gloating over the vista below.