Now, as Zenas patiently maintained his post upon the top of the boulder, he kept up an almost incessant mumbling. "I'll keep guard over him," he was saying. "Aye--I'll see that no harm comes to our _honorable_ guest!" whereupon he would smile craftily and press his face more closely to the window. "They know not--ha, ha! not one of them hath divined that it was I--I, Zenas, the detestable hunchback, who put the quietus to the young prince. Slow poison--that's the thing. _Slow poison!_ I'll teach them to steal from me the affections of my beloved and noble brother. Zenas, the crookback, will teach them! Slow poison put an end to the last, and now 'twill be Demon's turn to finish this one. At him, good Demon! _At him, sir!_" he concluded, with a sibilant hiss that penetrated every corner of the interior of the room. It was just at this moment that Sir Richard awakened with a sudden and violent start. During the interval of several seconds he remained in a sort of drowsy stupor, with his gaze fixed upon the curling flames. Doubtless from that instinct that gives warning of impending peril, he set his first sentient glance upon the forbidding beast lying before him upon the hearth. The hound's red eyeballs were glaring straight into his own. In the dim firelight he could see that its hair was bristling over its entire savage body, and that slowly and with deadly menace the brute was gathering its huge paws beneath it and assuming a crouching posture. Feeling certain that the slightest perceptible movement upon his part would precipitate the threatened spring, the young knight's fingers, under cover of the table, crept warily toward his sword-hilt. Distinctly he could hear the tap--tap--tapping of the raindrops as they splashed upon the ground from off the eaves. What, with the deathlike quiet, the red eyeballs and gleaming fangs of the hound, and the uncanniness of it all, it is a matter of wonderment that Sir Richard maintained his faculties to the degree that he did. Inch by inch his hand neared the familiar point where his sword-hilt should have been. Groping beyond, however, it encountered but an empty scabbard. His blade was gone! A crooked mouth beneath the malevolent eye at the window smiled exultingly. As the young knight started in a maze of utter bewilderment upon discovering his loss, the hound, straight and true as an arrow sped from a cross-bow, sprang full at his unprotected throat. With a light bound Sir Richard gained the top of the bench, and the powerful jaws of the bloodthirsty brute closed upon his greaves at the precise point where his unprotected throat had been but the instant before. It had been a right lucky stroke for him when he had bestowed a second thought to the matter of unlocking his stout leg-pieces.