“Come back! Come back!” they were shouting from below.
“Come up! Come up!” he commanded. “What are you frightened of?”
“It is the Evil One, himself!”
Peter shook his curved Cossack sword in the darkness. “Come up—come up, I tell you, you cowardly dogs—come up or I’ll separate your coward heads from your useless bodies. Come up, I say—come up!”
And so much was he feared that the three men on the second floor landing crossed themselves in the manner of the Greek Church and went creeping up after him.
“We have the treasure,” pleaded the nearest man in a trembling voice, “let us escape from here. This is nothing human. This is the work of the Evil One. Devils are abroad and a man is not sure of his soul.”
“Devils,” roared Peter, “bones and fiddlesticks! Come up here, you, and be men. This is no devil. This is some joker who values his head but lightly. If we do not silence him he will alarm the whole city before we get back to the gate.”
“Up that,” he commanded a second later, shoving the first man against the staircase to the loft. “Up that, and tell us what you see.”
The man mounted, trembling violently, for he was sure that the powers of darkness themselves were working against them.
“The door is open here,” he whispered, “and no lights within.” A man below him on the stairway passed the word along to Peter.