de them. There was furious cursing among the patrolmen as they
tumbled about in the room, the unhurt ones trampling their prostrate
companions and striking wildly at each other in their blindness and
confusion. At last one of them bethought him to open a dark lantern
with which the night guards were furnished. Its flame was fluttering
and gave forth a pale red light that danced weirdly on the floors and
walls.

Alice had snatched down one of her rapiers when the guards first
entered. They now saw her facing them with her slender blade leveled,
her back to the wall, her eyes shining dangerously. Madame Roussillon
had fled into the adjoining room. Jean had also disappeared. The
officer, a subaltern, in charge of the guard, seeing Alice, and not
quickly able to make out that it was a woman thus defying him, crossed
swords with her. There was small space for action; moreover the officer
being not in the least a swordsman, played awkwardly, and quick as a
flash his point was down. The rapier entered just below his thread with
a dull chucking stab. He leaped backward, feeling at the same time a
pair of arms clasp his legs. It was Jean, and the Lieutenant, thus
unexpectedly tangled, fell to the floor, breaking but not extinguishing
the guard's lantern as he went down. The little remaining oil spread
and flamed up brilliantly, as if eager for conflagration, sputtering
along the uneven boards.

"Kill that devil!" cried the Lieutenant, in a strangling voice, while
trying to regain his feet. "Shoot! Bayonet!"

In his pain, rage and haste, he inadvertently set his hand in the midst
of the blazing oil, which clung to the flesh with a seething grip.

"Hell!" he screamed, "fire, fire!"

Two or three bayonets were leveled upon Alice. Some one kicked Jean
clean across the room, and he lay there curled up in his hairy
night-wrap looking like an enormous porcupine.

At this point a new performer came upon the stage, a dark-robed thing,
so active that its outlines changed elusively, giving it no
recognizable features. It might have been the devil himself, or some
terrible unknown wild animal clad somewhat to resemble a man, so far as
the startled guards could make out. It clawed right and left, hurled
one of them against the wall, dashed another through the door into
Madame Roussillon's room, where the good woman was wailing at the top
of her voice, and felled a third with a stroke like that of a bear's
paw.

Consternation was at