disappeared from the
other side of the door, it was snatched from view.

An instant later there was a scream of anger and on a line where Ford
would have been, had he knelt to shove the envelope under the door,
three bullets splintered through the panel.

At the same moment the girl caught him by the wrist. Unheeding the
attack upon the door, her eyes were fixed upon the windows. With her
free hand she pointed at the one at which Ford had first appeared. The
blind was still raised a few inches, and they saw that the night was lit
with a strange and brilliant radiance. The storm had passed, and from
all the houses that backed upon the one in which they were prisoners
lights blazed from every window, and in each were crowded many people,
and upon the roof-tops in silhouette from the glare of the street lamps
below, and in the yards and clinging to the walls that separated them,
were hundreds of other dark, shadowy groups changing and swaying. And
from them rose the confused, inarticulate, terrifying murmur of a mob.
It was as though they were on a race-track at night facing a great
grandstand peopled with an army of ghosts. With the girl at his side,
Ford sprang to the window and threw up the blind, and as they clung to
the bars, peering into the night, the light in the room fell full upon
them. And in an instant from the windows opposite, from the yards below,
and from the house-tops came a savage, exultant yell of welcome, a
confusion of cries' orders, entreaties, a great roar of warning. At the
sound, Ford could feel the girl at his side tremble.

"What does it mean?" she cried.

"Cuthbert has raised the neighborhood!" shouted Ford jubilantly. "Or
else"--he cried in sudden enlightenment--"those shots we heard."

The girl stopped him with a low cry of fear. She thrust her arms between
the bars and pointed. In the yard below them was the sloping roof of the
kitchen. It stretched from the house to the wall of the back yard. Above
the wall from the yard beyond rose a ladder, and, face down upon the
roof, awry and sprawling, were the motionless forms of two men. Their
shining capes and heavy helmets proclaimed their calling.

"The police!" exclaimed Ford. "And the shots we thought were for those
in the house were for THEM! This is what has happened," he whispered
eagerly: "Prothero attacked Cuthbert. Cuthbert gets away and goes to the
police. He tells them you are here a prisoner, that I am here probably
a prisoner, a