but audible, begging, "Go back! Go back,
Connie! Lock your door!"

"You say one word aloud and I'll fire!" said a low voice, and Buck
reached the head of the stairs only to see Doctor Raymond lying half
dressed on the floor, his hands tied behind him, and a grasp of strong,
dirty fingers on his throat.

"Oh, you're killing him! You're killing my father!" cried Miss Connie,
in a half scream, as, too frightened to move, she stood huddled back
in a corner, gripping a large cloak about her.

Buck stared at the scene a fraction of a second. He could understand it
all. The doctor had been alarmed and had gone downstairs to investigate.
Miss Connie had been awakened and had followed her father, thinking
probably that he was ill. All this flashed through the boy's mind as
he flung out his weaponless hands in despair, but the gesture was the
salvation of the household. His fingers touched something cold, hard,
polished. It was a huge, heavy, brass bowl that held a fern. How often
his strong young fingers had cleaned that bowl with powder and chamois
skin, with never a thought that it would serve him well some time!
Now he grasped it, and creeping noiselessly around the large, square
"balcony" of the upstairs hall, he stood directly above the ruffian
whose fingers yet clutched the doctor's throat.

"Catch that girl!" the other man was saying. "She'll scream! Catch her,
I say, and gag her!"

"Oh, my girl, my little girl! Leave her alone, you demons!" gasped the
helpless doctor. But just as the fingers loosed their brutal grasp
on the father's throat to reach for the frail, delicate flesh of the
daughter's, straight as a carpenter's leaden plumb there crashed on to
the top of the assailant's head a huge, polished brass bowl. The man
fell, limp, senseless as a corpse. His confederate whirled on his heel,
and fired his revolver twice rapidly above his head, just missing Buck.

Connie shrieked, and the next moment the big, unclean fingers had
locked themselves about her throat, and she was forced to her knees,
while a guttural voice said: "Scream, will you! Well, try it! _This_
is what you get!"

For weeks Buck's ears rang with that awful, smothered cry of his young
mistress, of the tortured voice of the doctor, helplessly choking, "Oh,
my girl! My daughter!" But by this time Buck was three steps from the
bottom, and the back of the burglar was toward him as he crouched over
the struggling girl, choking the screams in her del