To speak the truth, this mob of unattached individuals in search of our friends were by now infuriated at their want of success, for it began to look as if they had been completely hoodwinked. Some fifty of them were dashing into and out of the houses, breaking doors open with the stocks of their rifles without the smallest ceremony, and venting upon cupboards and beds and woodwork, where they imagined someone might be hiding, all the ferocity they might have been expected to display had they been directly engaged with the Bulgarians. Many had their bayonets fixed, and drove them deep into recesses, into dark corners, and through the very heart of the gigantic mattresses on some of the beds. They bellowed at one another. Some even slipped cartridges into the breeches of their rifles and fired into the cellars and through the windows of the houses. Altogether there was pandemonium in that part of the city, pandemonium made worse by the rattle of musketry in the distance, by those bursting shells which still clattered amidst houses and streets, and by the shrill cries of terror, by the sobs and execrations of the civil population now subjected to this added trouble. "Ah! See! We have found their last lair. Look!" The sentry whom Dick had accosted at the mosque came rushing from the door of the tenement which our hero had but just vacated and waved an object aloft. It was a cap, the same which the Colonel had been wearing, and which the effort to lift the Commander to his back had dislodged from his head. In an instant the Turk had pounced upon it, and there he was now in the street, calling the officer and his ragged following towards him, gesticulating and shouting. "See! I remember this cap. It was upon the head of one of our prisoners, one of the foreign spies sent in here by the Bulgarians." "And the men themselves. You saw them also?" asked the officer, snatching the cap from him. "The house is empty. They are gone. That cap proves that they were there lately." "Fool! Did you not look for them? Did you not attempt to discover whence they had gone?" was shouted at him, while the furious officer looked as if he were capable of shooting him down in his anger. "Into the house," he bellowed. "Empty! Nothing here to keep us. Then out at the back. Look. The ground is soft after the melting of the snow. Here are fresh footmarks. Follow! Follow!" Led by the officer the mob went tearing down the tiny garden of the humble tenement, and burst their way through the gate at the bottom. Indeed, in their eagerness and fury at having been so duped, and in their knowledge that order was done with in Adrianople for the moment, they tore the gate from its hinges, trampled upon a couple of harmless civilians walking in the road to which the gate gave entrance, and then seized and beat them unmercifully.