; terror
drained the strength from her limbs; terror strangled the cry in her
throat....

"Dan--Dan--Dan!"

And Dan, flaming with such rage as he had never known before, sprang
upright, sprang forward, and rising on tiptoe to get the whole weight of
his body into it, brought his club whirring down upon that shaggy head.

Like a log the man fell, with a crash that echoed through the house, and
instantly from the hallway came a hoarse shout, the rush of heavy
feet....

In that instant, Dan was possessed by a curious clairvoyance; he could
see Kasia, he could see his victim, he could see the room behind him, he
could see the hall with the other guard running along it; he knew
somehow that there was a pistol in the belt of the man who lay at his
feet, and, without conscious will of his own, his hand found it and
jerked it out.

That other figure had reached the threshold, and Dan was conscious of
his red face and staring eyes and open mouth. He was conscious of a
hairy hand closing on a pistol-butt, and, again without willing it, he
jerked his own hand up and fired....

And the next moment, with one arm about Kasia, he threw back the bolts
of the front door, flung it open, and fled down the steps into the
street.

That was all Dan ever remembered of those fierce instants. They
appeared to him afterwards as a series of tableaux, each standing
distinctly by itself, unconnected with the past or with the future, and
he felt himself to be, not an actor in them, but a puppet moved by
wires. It was as though his brain had leaped from one mountain-top to
another, across intervening valleys buried in fog.

But the instant his feet touched the pavement, the instant the fight was
won, his will asserted itself and his brain began again to work
connectedly. And the first thing he remembered doing was holding up his
hand and staring at it, astonished that it did not hold a pistol. He had
no recollection of having dropped it.

"We must get help!" Kasia panted. "My father is there!"

"The Prince and Pachmann are there, too," said Dan; "perhaps others." He
looked up and down the street. "I wonder where we are? There's the
elevated. Come along!"

Together they sped to the nearest corner. It proved to be Ninth Avenue,
and there, in the shadow of the elevated, they found a policeman on
duty.

It is true that Dan was not as coherent as he might have been and that
the story he told sounded like a pipe-dream; but the policeman wa