Then, when Dave and his companion had entered the front room and stood ready to move upon the watcher through the door behind the screen, trusting the other door to the watchful eye of the guard at the front, we crept upstairs, with that sidewise movement which insures one who has the patience to try it a silent if slow passage, to the top, in single file.
At the top we separated, and while we—Lossing and myself—took our places at the door near the front, Jeffrys listened at the two rear doors, to make sure of the location of his prey, and at a signal which the guard below passed on to Dave we moved, each armed with a dark-lantern, to the attack.
I could hear Lossing's breath close beside me as I carefully and slowly tried the knob of the door and found that it yielded silently.
The house was an old one, and we saw as we slowly opened the door that the lock was only a fragmentary one; there was on the other side only a handle like that without. Holding our lanterns low we glided in, and were half-way across the room when I raised the lantern and turned its light carefully toward the bed, from whence long guttural breathing told of a sleeper unconscious of our nearness. With lantern in one hand and pistol in the other, I made a forward step as I saw by the ray thrown across the bed the form and face of Delbras; and then, suddenly, beneath my foot, something cracked and burst with a sharp explosion.
Only a parlour match, but it brought the sleeper to a sitting posture, and broad awake in a moment. He did not seem to so much as have seen me, but his eyes and Lossing's appeared to meet and challenge each other, and quicker than I can tell it he had bounded from his bed, snatching something from under the pillow as he sprang—something that glittered in his hand as he hurled himself upon Lossing, and the two grappled and swayed, with the knife gleaming above their heads, held thus by the strong hand of the English athlete.
As I sprang to place my lantern upon the table at the bed's head, that it might help me to see and to aid Lossing, a shriek rang from the room at the rear, and the next moment I saw the knife sent flying from the hand of Delbras, and the two go down, still struggling. A moment I watched them struggling there, and then somehow the villain wrenched one hand free and gripped it with an awful clutch upon Lossing's throat; the next there arose from below a succession of screeches that might have issued from the throat of a bedlamite.
Once and again I had tried to interfere in Lossing's behalf, but the effort seemed useless, until, as the screams from below ceased suddenly, I sprang past the two, and, turning suddenly, struck at Delbras with my clubbed pistol. I had aimed at the arm clutching at my friend's throat, but a sudden movement brought the villain's head in sharp contact with the butt of the pistol, and his hold suddenly relaxed, and he lay stunned and at our mercy.
When Lossing, not much the worse for his tussle but somewhat short of breath, had risen and shaken himself together, I said: 'He's only stunned and will soon come to. Shoot him if he stirs before I come back.' And I ran to the room in the rear.
What had happened there can be soon told.
When Jeffrys opened the door of the rear room, which did not boast a lock, he saw a lamp burning dimly upon a shelf in a corner; upon the bed opposite a woman and a man, both sleeping, and under the one window a coil of rope ladder, as if ready for use.