"That's all there is to it. They had locked the door on me--three of them--and when the back of the chair gave out--I was swinging it around my head--I made a break for out-of-doors." "Oh!--go on--go on, Louis!" came the chorus. "No, I'd rather listen to you men. I haven't been tattooed in the South Seas, nor half murdered rounding Cape Horn. I'm just a plain painter, and my experience is limited, and my three Perugian villains were just three dirty Italians, one of whom was the landlord who had charged me five prices for my meal, and tried to hold me up until I paid it--only a vulgar brawl, don't you see? The landlord had his head in splints when I passed him the next day." "You were lucky to escape," said The Engineer. "They have a way of knifing you while you are asleep. I had a friend who just got out of one of those Italian dives with his life." "Yes, that was why I was swinging the chair. Hard for any three men to get at you if its legs and back hold out. Of course a fellow can sneak up behind you with a knife and then you--By Jingo!--come to think of it, I _can_ tell you a story! It just popped into my head. You have brought it all back"--and he nodded to our guest--"about the closest shave--so I thought at the time--that I ever had in my life. Your ghost stories don't hold a candle to it--stealthy assassin--intended victim sound asleep--miraculous escape!--Oh! a blood-curdler!--I was scared blue." Everybody shifted their chairs and craned their heads to watch Louis' face the better, overjoyed that he had at last wakened up. Louis scared blue--and he a match for any five men--meant a tale worth hearing. "It was the summer I made those studies of mountain brooks flowing out of the glaciers--you remember them, Herbert? Anyway, I was across the Swiss border, and in a ragged Italian town dumped down on the side of a hill as if it had been spilt from a cart--one of those sprawled-out towns with a white candle of a campanile overtopping the heap. The diligence, about sunup, had dropped me at the exact spot with my traps, and was hardly out of sight before I had started to work, and I kept it up all day, pegging away like mad, as I always do when a subject takes hold of me--and this particular mountain brook was choking the life out of me, with lots of deep greens and transparent browns all through it, and the creamy froth of a glass of beer floating on the top.