I gathered up the scattered weapons and piled them all in one corner, farthest from the door, where I now proposed to set about getting free. With the fearful blight of uncovered treason in his soul, Broussard obeyed me cringingly as a servant, and worked as hard, for his safety lay in mine. We went first to the door by which we entered, and after a tedious examination failed to find any means by which it could be opened or broken down. A stout latch, of some pattern we could not tell, held it fast from the outside. There was no catch or fastening of any sort within. The age-hardened oak, studded as it was with heavily wrought nails, forbade the plan of cutting through. This would require days and days of patient labor, and I was already faint from lack of food and the exhaustion of the night. Plainly the room was intended for a prison, and as such it served well its purpose. Baffled and disheartened I turned my thought to the window. It looked out upon the street; this was so much in my favor. The irons that guarded it were close set, bending out toward the street in the shape of a bow. I judged this was in order that archers stationed there might shoot the more easily into the street in times of siege.
I could have reached this without trouble, but I desired to employ Broussard, that I might know where he was and prevent treachery. For that double purpose I reached up and grasped the sill, commanding him to catch me about the knees and lift so I might see out. This he did. While in that position he made a pretense of shifting his hold, and something impelled me to glance downward at him. He was stealthily drawing a concealed knife from his bosom. I threw all my weight back upon him, casting the twain of us together to the floor. Meantime he had the knife full drawn, in his left hand held at my breast.
I grappled with him, holding his left hand in my right, and with the free hand clutched him by the throat, burying my thumb deep in his wind-pipe. Instinctively he raised both hands to protect his throat, and then we struggled to our feet. He made futile efforts to strike me with the knife, but his strength deserted him with his wind. The blade dropped clattering on the floor. My other hand closed about his neck, circling it with an unyielding collar of steel. Desperately as a caged rat might fight he squirmed and twisted in my grasp. To no avail.
Tigerish now, as though I held a rabid dog, I thrust him back against the wall, and there rigidly held him fast. In merciless silence I listened to the precious breath gurgling from his body; a reddish froth gathered at the lips. I could feel his hot blood surge and beat against my thumb under that deadly pressure. The cold sweat stood in clammy clusters upon his forehead; his head thrown back, the eyes turned toward the ceiling no longer pleaded into mine. I sickened almost at sight of the tongue swelling black, which seemed to consume all the fleeing color from lips and face. Oh God, how he struggled! His hands closed over mine as bars of steel to tear them from his throat.
Even in our mortal strife I marked the eternal harmony of the scene. Truly death had never stage more fitting whereon to play its last stern drama of dissolution. Hemmed in by four massive walls of granite, ghastly grim and desolately gray, we wrestled in a stifling stillness, while hell stood umpire at the game. No sound of trumpet, no warlike cry, no strains of martial music were there to thrill the nerves and taunt men on to glory. We fought to the scrape and scratch of shuffling feet, the labored gasp, the rattle in the throat, while echo hushed in silence and in fright.
He grew more quiet, his muscles stiffened and relaxed—he was no longer conscious. A few more convulsive quivers, as a serpent might writhe and jerk, then he hung, a limp dead thing, in my hands. My outstretched arms seemed made as a gibbet, feeling no fatigue, so lightly did they sustain him. Cords of brass could be no more tense than mine; his weight was as nothing. Softly I eased him down, and composed his limbs in decent order upon the stones.
Then I rose, and gazed complacently at my work. Yes, it was well done, excellently done, in fact. The most expert strangler of the Choctows could have done no better. Those purpling lines about the throat, those darker clots where my thumbs had left their signs, could not have been more intelligently placed. I smiled my satisfaction at the job, then—then—my own overstrung nerves gave way, and I fell unconscious across the corpse of my hands' creation.
When I came to myself I was weeping, weeping as a child might weep, over the dead, distorted face of him I had loved. How long this lasted I had no means of knowing. Uncompromising necessity forced me to action; forbade me time to dream.
The body being in my way where it lay—for I proposed now to work in earnest at the window—I moved it tenderly as possible across the floor and stretched him out near the door sill. Springing up then I attacked the bars at the window. Hours and hours I labored, impelled to greater effort by the dread of spending another night in that room of murder. I was patient, too, patient with the cunning of a maniac.
The dagger made my chisel; my sword, wrapped in a cloth to muffle the strokes, furnished me a maul. Full half the day was before me. The rough paving stones below held out the hope of escape or death. How to reach the street after the bars were removed, I did not suffer myself to consider. I should go mad if I lay idle. I leaned as far out the window as the grating would allow, and observed a guard standing in plain view at the corner. It was very evident the Provost of Paris had taken possession of the house, and there was little use in my trying to make a way out the door.