me; for I was convinced that the happening was susceptible of no
natural explanation.

I had heard--who has not heard?--of the Indian rope trick, where
a fakir throws a rope into the air which remains magically suspended
whilst a boy climbs upward and upward until he disappears into space.
I had never credited accounts of the performance; but now I began
seriously to wonder if the arts of Hassan of Aleppo were not as
great or greater than the arts of fakir. But the crowning mystery
to my mind was that of the Hashishin's death. It would seem that
as he had hung suspended in space he had been shot!

"You say that someone heard the sound of the shot?" I asked suddenly.

"Several people," replied Bristol; "but no one knows, or no one
will say, from what direction it came. I shall go on with the
inquiry, of course, and cross-examine every soul in Wyatt's
Buildings. Meanwhile, I'm open to confess that I am beaten."

In the velvet sky countless points blazed tropically. The hum of
the traffic in Waterloo Road reached us only in a muffled way.
Sordidness lay beneath us, but up there under the heavens we seemed
removed from it as any Babylonian astronomer communing with the
stars.

When, some ten minutes later, I passed out into the noise of
Waterloo Road, I left behind me an unsolved mystery and took with
me a great dread; for I knew that the quest of the sacred slipper
was not ended, I knew that another tragedy was added to its history
--and I feared to surmise what the future might hold for all of us.