In the meantime, Cyril, smoking quietly on his fragment of rock, and all unconscious of danger, was disturbed by the noise of angry voices. Almost as they reached his ear, a haggard man, in the flat cap and long, dull-grey coat of the Scythian peasant, rushed round the corner of the path, and recoiled precipitately on catching sight of him. “Odd!” said Cyril to himself. “Mad, perhaps,” and mechanically his hand sought his revolver in its accustomed pocket. His fingers had scarcely closed upon it when the throng of pilgrims burst upon him with furious shouts, and he had barely time to set his back against the rocky wall before he found himself confronted by a semicircle of angry faces, clenched fists, and menacing clubs. “Kill him! kill the renegade!” was the cry. “Kill the traitor, and save the Holy Places from the Jewish dogs!” “You had better go on your way quietly,” shouted Cyril in his best Scythian. “I am armed,” and he drew out the revolver. “There are stones enough!” cried a voice, and a man who had found a point of vantage flung a jagged piece of rock which struck Cyril on the temple. The sight of the flowing blood appeared to stimulate the ferocity of the mob, and deprive its members of such hesitation as they may have felt in throwing themselves upon a solitary man, for they sprang forward with a howl. Cyril had only time to fire one shot into the air, in the hope partly of attracting Mansfield’s notice and partly of frightening his assailants, before his right arm was broken by a blow from a club as he raised the revolver, which dropped from his hand. Hustled, beaten, and knocked about, the blood streaming from his face, he had one thing, and only one, in his favour, and this was that the pilgrims were so closely pressed together on the narrow ledge as to be unable to get him down and trample upon him. Presently he became aware that one of them, who must have caught it as it fell, was holding the revolver to his head. Before the trigger could be pulled, however, the voice of a priest, who had mounted upon the fragment of rock upon which the victim had been sitting, rang like a trumpet across the din. “No shots! no shots! Will you give the heathen Roumis cause to accuse us of murder? Throw the apostate over the precipice, so that it may not be known whose hand executed judgment upon him.”