at sound of which
I shut my ears in horror, only to open them again in dread as, with one
simultaneous impulse, they flung themselves upon the lawyer who,
foreseeing this rush, had backed up against the wall.

He tried to stem the tide.

"I knew nothing of the poisoning," he protested. "That was not my reason
for declining the drink. I wished to preserve my senses--to carry out my
client's wishes. As God lives, I did not know he meant to carry his
revenge so far. Mercy! Mer--"

But the hands which clutched him were the hands of murderers, and the
lawyer's puny figure could not stand up against the avalanche of human
terror, relentless fury and mad vengeance which now rolled in upon it.
As I bounded to his relief he turned his ghastly face upon me. But the
way between us was blocked, and I was preparing myself to see him sink
before my eyes, when an unearthly shriek rose from behind us, and every
living soul in that mass of struggling humanity paused, set and
staring, with stiffened limbs and eyes fixed, not on him, not on me, but
on one of their own number, the only woman amongst them, Janet
Clapsaddle, who, with clutching hands clawing her breast, was reeling in
solitary agony in her place beside the board. As they looked she fell,
and lay with upturned face and staring eyes, in whose glassy depths the
ill-fated ones who watched her could see mirrored their own impending
doom.

It was an awful moment. A groan, in which was concentrated the despair
of seven miserable souls, rose from that petrified band; then, man by
man, they separated and fell back, showing on each weak or wicked face
the particular passion which had driven them into crime and made them
the victims of this wholesale revenge. There had been some sort of bond
between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul.
Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached;
and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought
to escape by doors, windows or any outlet which promised release from
this fatal spot. One rushed by me--I do not know which one--and I felt
as if a flame from hell had licked me, his breath was so hot and the
moans he uttered so like the curses we imagine to blister the lips of
the lost. None of them saw me; they did not even detect the sliding form
of the lawyer crawling away before them to some place of egress of which
they had no knowledge; and, convinced that in this scene of de