This result came in time, helped on by his reckless wasting of his strength, and by the heavy coat he was wearing. Then it was my turn, and I began to press him slowly backward, changing my defense into an attack, and crowding him to make good before he should recover and catch his second wind. Round and round the narrow cell we went, and still the heavy saber rose and fell, and the slender rapier darted in and out, and never a drop of blood was drawn. “End it!” I cried; “why don’t you end it, you brute beast?” He took me at my word, or tried to. In a fierce rush he backed me all across the room, and when he had me in a corner, stooped, caught up the heavy stool in his left hand and hurled it at my head. It was a base advantage to take of a lighter-armed antagonist, but I forgave him. For at the instant of missile-hurling I found my opening, and the rapier flashed in over the momentarily neglected guard; darted in and found its mark and pierced it. I did not thrust a second time; did not need to. While the clock could tick twice, he stood looking at me with a sort of shocked wonder in his bloodshot eyes. Then he turned away slowly, and fell face downward across the bunk-bed, and I think he never stirred afterward. XXIII OPEN FIELD AND RUNNING FLOOD I CONFESS, with some prickings of remorse, that I did not stay to help Seytoun live or die. Fiercely swift as the fight had been, it had cut deeply into the little time I could count on, and no sooner was it ended than I was down on my knees under the table, and burrowing out through the breach in the wall. Once in the earth kennel, with the candle, and my sword and the clasp-knife, I replaced the bricks hurriedly in the breach and began to sound the wooden bulkhead. To my dismay, it seemed as solid as the earth itself, and I saw nothing for it but to try to dig a passage around it. This might well be the work of hours; but after the moment of despair it gave me, I fell upon the task furiously, digging with the knife, with my hands, and at last with the rapier, boring it around to cut out futile little cones of the crumbling clay. I was stabbing thus feverishly at the stubborn earth bank, and accomplishing little, as I thought, when sounds in the powder-room behind me made me stop and listen. I heard the door clang back against the wall; heard footsteps and voices, and then the shout of surprise when they found Seytoun. I did not need to look at my watch to see the time: it was midnight and my gallows guard was come for me. I think it must have been my good angel whispering at my ear--the prompting to make a last despairing push with the thin-bladed sword in the clay at the back of the shallow excavation. To my joy the steel went through, and by wriggling it about I quickly had a hole through which the keen salt air of the December night poured to refresh me.