“Then up, every mother’s son of you,” ordered the leader. “There is a man there. Put a knife in his throat and descend quickly.”
The rest pulled themselves up and entered the loft. After a few minutes of impatient waiting Peter climbed the steps himself and pushed himself across the dark threshold.
“What have you found?” he demanded impatiently.
“Nothing,” the answer came faintly from one corner of the loft.
“If there is any one here let him speak now,” Peter bellowed. His voice drowned the quiet opening of the door of a closet in the back of the room. “If we find any one it will go hard——”
Like a bolt of lightning out of a clear sky the loft was suddenly illuminated with a glow of red fire as there leapt into existence out of the blackness of the night the very incarnation of the Evil One in his worst mood. Clad in fiery garments which smelled of fire and brimstone and which seemed to blaze and burn and give off a greenish smoke and flame, he moved slowly forward, waving in his right hand a scepter of flaming red which was crackling with heat as a green bough crackles when it burns, while from its end little balls of fire were dripping.
It was so sudden, so unexpected, this apparition in a pitch-black world of night, of a red, fiery, glowing devil, that Peter, stout-hearted as he was, let out a sudden shriek, and trembled like a leaf.
But if he trembled, the others went mad with fear. “Out! Out!” they shrieked, crowding to the stairway.
Upon their heels came the fantastic demon waving his scepter right and left and favoring first one and then another with smart blows, as they fought to be first at the stairway. Two reached it at one time and went scrambling down to be joined by the third a second later, who came tumbling down upon them just as they gained the third-floor landing.
Peter, however, stood his ground for a moment. Turning about at the head of the stairs he shouted, “Be you man or demon I will see what you have in you,” and rushed with his drawn sword upon the weird figure. That one simply stood aside as he rushed, and waved his hand in the direction of the man’s face.