One of the panels gave way with a loud crack and the Chief stuck his hand through the hole left by the panel and unlocked the door from the other side.
“Come on,” he shouted, and he jerked open the door and flung himself through it, with me close behind him. Then he cried out and I heard the thud of a heavy fall. The next moment I realized that there was no floor in the darkness beneath my feet.
I began to tumble head over heels down a flight of stairs in the darkness, bringing up against a door at the bottom with a bang that shook the breath out of me. And it seemed to me, during that fall, that every time I touched a step it was either on my head where the bullet had creased me, or on my wounded shoulder. I know that it was the shoulder that hit the door at the bottom first.
The Chief had come to a stop just before me. Indeed he partly broke my fall. He jumped to his feet at once and started fumbling with this second door, but in spite of his haste I could hear him chuckling to himself over my few well-chosen remarks about those stairs and that door.
A moment later there came another crack and this second door flew open like the first. I rolled out into the open air, beneath the open sky, and jumped to my feet.
The Chief caught my arm. “There he goes,” he shouted. Then he started to run into the night.
Sure enough, in the starlight I could make out a figure walking quickly away from us. At the Chief’s shout it began to run. And taking a long breath I began to run also.
The man ahead ran on for perhaps a hundred feet or so and then suddenly darted into the doorway of a low stone building. As the Chief and I drew closer, I gave a sudden shout, for I remembered that low building only too well. It was the place in which I had been imprisoned and in which I had killed Ivanovitch and his satellite.
We had gained rapidly on the figure ahead during that run, and the latter had had to pause to get the door open, so that we were close behind him when he finally disappeared into the building. He slammed the door in our faces, but it did not lock. We got it open almost at once, and as it swung outward, a dazzling glare sprang up from the middle of the room beyond. The cylinder there had suddenly flashed into dazzling fire.
I shaded my eyes as well as I could from the glare, and presently I realized that a man was crouching in a corner by the big machine which operated the cylinder. But the glare held us stationary on the threshold for a moment, and while we hesitated, the man by the machine darted forward and flung open the side of the cylinder which opened toward us. In the bright light I could see the swathed black silk about the slender limbs.