But scarce had I gone forth into the passage beyond, when I heard such a tumult and angry debate of voices as remembering Plat's assertion of the Trappist silence that was in this house enjoined upon pain of death I could not but suppose some very especial cause to have hurried the thieves into so presumptuous an offence. It was now altogether night within the building, and with these stifled cries sounding in my ears, and execrations of men I knew to be desperate villains, I confess my heart quailed within me and my strength all leaked away, so that I could not even fly by the way I had come, but stood with my back to the wall, sweating and staring, with never a thought but to remain unperceived. Of the fashion and plan of the house I was perfectly ignorant, having but once before been within it, and then trusting to another to guide me through its secret recesses; yet I remembered that there was somewhere that great wide staircase which Plat had said was the common room and meeting-place of the thieves, where they transacted their affairs and shared their food and treasure. 'Twas, then, with a clutch of horrid surprise that I now saw, low down before me, a sort of men bearing lanterns that issued from the shadows, and began to scale the stairs; for by the uncertain light I could both distinguish them and that I myself was standing in one of the open galleries that surrounded the stairhead and overlooked the body of the hall. But no sooner had I understood this, than any further discovery was thwarted by a man's brushing past me in the dark, so close I could hear him fetch his breath, and instantly upon that there followed the click of a snaphance. "Stay there, you creeping lice!" he said, speaking in a cool middle voice, "or I will shoot you down, man by man, where you stand." At this unlooked-for interruption, the men upon the stair came to a sudden stand, while some that had advanced higher than the rest, fell back, so that all hung crowded together, their lanterns raised and their eyes seeking upward for the man that held them at bay. I have never seen so dastardly and scarce human visages as they showed, some with bleared eyes and matted hair, others dark and vengeful, their brows and cheeks scarred with wounds or open sores. Here a man went half-naked like a savage Indian; there one wore a ragged coat guarded with silver; all were armed, though with such a hazardous sort of weapons, that but for the assured skill and practice with which they wielded them, one might have dared oppose the whole rout single-handed. But in their hands these weapons seemed proper as claws to beasts, or tushes to a wild boar, and instinctively, as the man raised his pistol, I drew my sword from the sheath. The noise I made attracted the man's attention to me, and he would perhaps have spoken, had not the bloodthirsty rout, recking no further opposition, sprung forward again.