There is unquestionably many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, but on the present occasion there was no such slip. Mariano succeeded in diminishing and flattening himself to such an extent that the janissaries passed without observing him. The moment they were out of sight he glided from his hiding-place, and soon found his way to the top of the ramparts, near the Bab-Azoun gate. The head of Castello was at his elbow; the wearied Turkish sentinel was not a hundred yards distant Mariano could see him clearly defined against the eastern sky every time he reached the end of his beat.

 

“If he takes it into his head to walk this way, I am lost,” thought Mariano.

 

It seemed as if the man had heard the thought, for he walked slowly towards the spot where the youth lay at full length on the ground. There was no mound or niche or coping of any kind behind which a man might conceal himself. The dead man’s head was the only object that broke the uniformity of the wall. In desperation, Mariano lay down with it between himself and the advancing sentinel, and crept close to it—so close that while he lay there he fancied that a drop of something cold fell from it and mingled with the perspiration that stood in large beads upon his brow!

 

The sentinel stopped just as Mariano was preparing to spring upon and endeavour to strangle him. He looked earnestly and long in the direction of the dead man’s head, as if in meditation on its owner’s untimely fate, or, possibly, on the unusual length and solidity of the shadow that tailed away from it!

 

Fortunately he advanced no further, but, turning on his heel, walked slowly away. Just then the moon shot forth a ray of light from the midst of the cloud that had covered it, as if to cheer the fugitive on his desperate adventure. Instead of cheering, however, it alarmed him, and expedited his movements.

 

In a moment Mariano put a loop of his rope over the head and drew it tight on the spike close to the masonry. Another moment and he was over the parapet, down the wall, and into the ditch. Here again unusual caution was needful, but the youth’s cat-like activity enabled him to overcome all obstacles. In a few minutes he was speeding over the Sahel hills in the direction of Frais Vallon.

 

We need scarcely say that wind and muscle were tried to their uttermost that night. In an incredibly short space of time he reached the gate of the consul’s garden, which stood open, and darted in.

 

Now it chanced that night that the stout British seaman, Ted Flaggan, lay in a hammock suspended between two trees in a retired part of the consul’s garden, the weather being so warm that not only he but several of the other domestics had forsaken their dwellings during the night, and lay about the grounds in various contrivances more or less convenient, according to the fancy or mechanical aptitude of the makers thereof.

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