w if the door was being kept open to
invite the whole town. The child stood her ground on the doorstep.
An instant later a hand reached out, clutched her--it seemed by the hair--
and dragged her inside. Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of
heavy blows--

"Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll.

I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into
the passage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us.

At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down
the passage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming.
The child, borne forward by our combined weight, tottered and fell almost
across the threshold of this room, where a flight of stairs, lit by a
dingy lamp, led up into obscure darkness. On the third stair under the
lamp I caught a momentary vision of a dirty, half-naked boy standing with
a drawn dirk in his hand, and with that, my foot catching against
Meliar-Ann's body, I pitched past, head foremost, into the lighted room.

As I fell I heard, or seemed to hear, a scuffle of feet, followed by a
shout from Hartnoll behind us--"My dirk! You dirty young villain!"--and
another stampede, this time upon the stairway. Then, all of a sudden, the
room was quiet, and I picked myself up and fell back against the
door-post, face to face with half a dozen women.

They were assuredly the strangest set of females I had ever set eyes on,
and the tallest-grown: nor did it relieve my astonishment to note that
they wore bonnets and shawls, as if for a journey, and that two or three
were smoking long clay pipes. The room, in fact, was thick with
tobacco-smoke, through the reek of which my eyes travelled to a disorderly
table crowded with glasses and bottles of strong waters, in the midst of
which two tallow dips illuminated the fog; and beyond the table to the
figure of a man stooping over a couple of half-packed valises; an
enormously stout man swathed in greatcoats--a red-faced, clean-shaven man,
with small piggish eyes which twinkled at me wickedly as I picked myself
up, and he, too, stood erect to regard me.

"Press-gang be d--d!" he growled, answering the virago's call of warning.
"More likely a spree ashore. And where might _you_ come from, young
gentleman? And what might be _your_ business to-night, breakin' into a
private house?"

I cast a wild look over the bevy of forbidding females and temporised,
backing a little until m