A vice-like grip fastened upon my left ankle. Hazily I became aware that the dark room was become flooded with figures. The whole yellow gang were upon me--the entire murder-group composed of units recruited from the darkest places of the East! I have never counted myself a man of resource, and have always envied Nayland Smith his possession of that quality, in him extraordinarily developed; but on this occasion the gods were kind to me, and I resorted to the only device, perhaps, which could have saved me. Without releasing my hold upon the crossbar, I clutched at the ledge with the fingers of both hands and swung back, into the room, my right leg, which was already across the sill. With all my strength I kicked out. My heel came in contact, in sickening contact, with a human head; beyond doubt I had split the skull of the man who held me. The grip upon my ankle was released automatically; and now consigning all my weight to the rope, I slipped forward, as a diver, across the broad ledge and found myself sweeping through the night like a winged thing.... The line, as Karamaneh had assured me, was of well-judged length. Down I swept to within six or seven feet of the street level, then up, up, at ever-decreasing speed, toward the vague oblong of the open window beyond. I hope I have been successful, in some measure, in portraying the varied emotions which it was my lot to experience that night, and it may well seem that nothing more exquisite could remain for me. Yet it was written otherwise; for as I swept up to my goal, describing the inevitable arc which I had no power to check, I saw that _one_ awaited me. Crouching forward half out of the open window was a Burmese dacoit, a cross-eyed, leering being whom I well remembered to have encountered two years before in my dealings with Dr. Fu-Manchu. One bare, sinewy arm held rigidly at right angles before his breast, he clutched a long curved knife and waited--waited--for the critical moment when my throat should be at his mercy! I have said that a strange coolness had come to my aid; even now it did not fail me, and so incalculably rapid are the workings of the human mind that I remembered complimenting myself upon an achievement which Smith himself could not have bettered, and this in the immeasurable interval which intervened between the commencement of my upward swing and my arrival on a level with the window. I threw my body back and thrust my feet forward. As my legs went through the opening, an acute pain in one calf told me that I was not to escape scathless from the night's melee. But the dacoit went rolling over in the darkness of the room, as helpless in face of that ramrod stroke as the veriest infant....