The Chief told me afterwards that he had hesitated out of sheer curiosity and a desire to take the man alive and learn more about his plans. Perhaps that is true, or perhaps this Emperor succeeded in hypnotizing his enemy and rendering him powerless to shoot. I know that I would have hesitated to shoot, in his place, out of sheer respect for power. But there was one member of our party who had suffered at this man’s hands and who was actuated by no such scruples. There was a little pause, as I have said, and then suddenly Larry leapt forward, slipped the revolver out of the Chief’s hand and sent three shots in quick succession into the figure before us. The banging of the revolver echoed in the room, to the accompaniment of a crash of falling glass, and the figure disappeared as though it had dissolved into thin air. We had been staring into a rimless, skillfully arranged mirror. The man with whom we had been talking had been close beside us in the room on the other side of a screen and had projected his voice in some way to come from the vicinity of the mirror. All this we realized far quicker than it takes to tell it. And with a roar of rage the Chief dashed into the room, with us at his heels. At the same moment there came a hollow, contemptuous laugh from the side of the room and a door opened and closed again quickly. Without waiting to call directions to his men this time, the Chief dashed for this door and attempted to snatch it open. It resisted his efforts, and I stepped back a little so that he could open it with his jemmy. But the Chief was too much in earnest to stop even for that. He too stepped back. And then he flung himself at that door like a full-back two yards from the goal. One of the panels gave way with a loud crack and the Chief stuck his hand through the hole left by the panel and unlocked the door from the other side. “Come on,” he shouted, and he jerked open the door and flung himself through it, with me close behind him. Then he cried out and I heard the thud of a heavy fall. The next moment I realized that there was no floor in the darkness beneath my feet. I began to tumble head over heels down a flight of stairs in the darkness, bringing up against a door at the bottom with a bang that shook the breath out of me. And it seemed to me, during that fall, that every time I touched a step it was either on my head where the bullet had creased me, or on my wounded shoulder. I know that it was the shoulder that hit the door at the bottom first. The Chief had come to a stop just before me. Indeed he partly broke my fall. He jumped to his feet at once and started fumbling with this second door, but in spite of his haste I could hear him chuckling to himself over my few well-chosen remarks about those stairs and that door. A moment later there came another crack and this second door flew open like the first. I rolled out into the open air, beneath the open sky, and jumped to my feet.