aking
the straight way with a vengeance, he flung himself literally and bodily
against it. The jingling crash brought a howl from the stairhead, but he
broke a gap with his bleeding fists, wrenched out the crosspieces.... A
spatter of warm rain blew in upon us.

"There's only the street below!" I gasped.

"Out!" was Sutton's crisp order. "Out--and through--and over with you!"

We had no choice; his furious energy drove us. Wickwire hung a dead
weight in our arms, but we propped him on the jagged sill and scrambled
after, any fashion. Clinging there, we had one last glimpse into the
gallery behind us, set like a stage for our benefit.

We saw the little Chinese come on with uplifted knife, spitting and
glaring like a wildcat, saw the knobbed, bare shoulders and coppery,
brute faces of his crew, saw Sutton turning back. He had no weapon, but
he armed himself. He dragged the big green joss from its niche, lamps,
incense, and all, twirled it over his head, exultant, transformed with
berserk fury, shouting some free battle cry of his own--and met them.
Thereafter the place went dark in a babble of shrieks, and we dropped
like slugs from a garden wall.

So we brought Chris Wickwire home again--what was left of him....

There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke
weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The
reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a
little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever,
unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had
paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of
the _Moung Poh_ took stock of themselves once more, and of each other
and an ill prospect.

Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was
regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall
except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff
had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.

"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly
while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly
as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we
get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself--try the Port
Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."

We looked at the shell of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the--the
hospital, then?" I a