Now, I saw that, as he spoke, he had caught up a rope which had been dexterously fixed to a boulder upon the opposite bank of the stream and allowed to trail in the water while he went to fetch me from the house. Fixing this as cleverly to the rock upon our side, he made a bridge by which any strong lad could have crossed, the pool being as low as it then was; and no sooner had he given me the signal than I swung myself out and almost immediately found a footing upon the further shore. His own passage, when first he crossed, must have been very perilous, I thought; and I could but imagine that he had thrown the rope over first and trusted to the grappling iron affixed to the end upon the garden side. This, however, was but a speculation. He crossed now as I had done, and together we cast the knot from the boulder and drew the rope in. If all our acts were cool and collected, I set the fact down to the knowledge that we were prisoners of the valley no longer, and that the hills were before us. What mattered the alarm now sounding through the gardens, the hoarse cry of voices, the blowing of whistles, the running to and fro of excited men? More ominous by far was a second rifle-shot, awakening crashing echoes in the mountains. This, I believed, one of my own yacht’s company had fired. Plainly our men had either stumbled upon an ambush or fallen into some snare set upon the road we must follow. The truth of the issue could not but be momentous to us all. Either we must find them prisoners or free men who stood in instant danger. There could be no moment of delay which was not hazardous, and we permitted none directly our foothold had been secured and the rope drawn in. “Did you come alone, Okyada?” I asked my servant presently. He dissented as he folded the coils of rope. “The honourable Scotchman—he is waiting with the lantern, excellency.” I smiled, but did not offend his sense of that which was due to so great a person as Balaam, the Scotch boatswain. “Would it be far from here, Okyada?” “That which your excellency could walk in a minute.”