Bob, Jack, Frank and Roy Stone followed the first wave of the attack into Athensi in a company of 200 rebels commanded by Jepthah. At Bob’s special request, this group made its way through the tumultuous streets to the Coliseum. It was a moonless night, and the great amphitheater lay dark and mysterious outside the walls of the Inner City. Around those walls raged a furious battle but in the Coliseum itself, which the Janissaries had no idea of defending, all was silent. That is, until the rebels with Bob at their head, clad again in the gladiator’s armor he had worn on being rescued, entered the arena with their wavering torches. The tumult of the desperate fighting within the city was reduced to a murmur down there, on the sand, at the base of those towering tiers of seats. Yet here, too, it had penetrated and the poor captives, locked in their quarters for the night, and awaiting the coming of the Sacrificial Games, now only a week away, were awake and moving about restlessly. As the light of the torches fell through the massive bars of the great door set in the solid stone of the wall, and penetrated the interior of the single great room where all the alien gladiators were quartered and where Bob, too, had lived, the poor fellows crowded forward. They did not know what the tumult in the city and now the arrival of this armed force portended, but Bob was easily recognizable in his armor and made friendly signs indicating he had come to release them. At the same time, men armed with stout axes and wrenching bars attacked the gate. It was stubborn and resisted all assaults a long time but eventually gave way, and then the slaves threw themselves at Bob’s feet and tried to kiss his hands. To these men, most of whom were Negroes, although a few Berbers and Tuaregs were in the number, Bob’s sudden rescue by airplane had appeared as a miracle. And now his return to release them had an even greater effect on their primitive intelligences. While this was going on Jepthah headed another party which broke down a similar gate on the other side of the arena, behind which were confined the young Athensians destined to fight the slaves in the Sacrificial Games. To one or two of them he was known, and when he spread the word of the success of the revolution the joy of these young fellows, snatched from their families by the Oligarchs to go to death, knew no bounds. CHAPTER XXVIII. CONCLUSION. After the final capitulation of the Oligarchy, Mr. Hampton and the members of his party went to live in quarters assigned them in one of the palaces of the Inner City. It was an age-worn stone structure of immensely thick walls, two stories in height, and covering five acres of ground. In it were hundreds of rooms and apartments, sumptuously appointed with many luxuries.