ught
the top at a place where the rusty-pointed nails were few and broken,
and next moment, with torn coat and a scratch on his arm, he was within
the palisade.

Through the crepuscular light, bulks of things--big, black,
formless--were dimly seen; but nearer the hoarding than the middle of
the waste open ground was a spectacle that puzzled the looker-on. Great
fans were winnowing the air, a wheel was running at prodigious speed,
flaming vapors fled hissing forth, and the figure of a man, attached
in some way to the revolving fans, was now lifted several feet from the
ground, now dashed to earth again, now caught in and now torn from the
teeth of the flying wheel.

Barton did not pause long in empty speculation; he shouted, "Hold
on!" or some other such encouragement, and ran in the direction of
the sufferer. But, as he stumbled over dust-heaps, piles of wood, old
baskets, outworn hats, forsaken boots, and all the rubbish of the waste
land, the movement of the flying fans began to slacken, the wheels ran
slowly down, and, with a great throb and creak, the whole engine ceased
moving, as a heart stops beating. Then, just when all was over, a voice
came from the crumpled mass of humanity in the centre of the hideous
mechanism:

"Don't come here; stop, on your peril! I am armed, and I will shoot!"

The last words were feeble, and scarcely audible.

Barton stood still. Even a brave man likes (the old Irish duelling days
being over) at least to know _why_ he is to be shot at.

"What's the matter with you?" he said. "What on earth are you doing? How
can _you_ talk about shooting? Have you a whole bone in your body?"

To this the only reply was another groan; then silence.

By this time there was a full measure of the light "which London takes
the day to be," and Barton had a fair view of his partner in this
dialogue.

He could see the crumpled form of a man, weak and distorted like a
victim of the rack--scattered, so to speak--in a posture inconceivably
out of drawing, among the fragments of the engine. The man's head was
lowest, and rested on an old battered box; his middle was supported by a
beam of the engine; one of his legs was elevated on one of the fans, the
other hung disjointedly in the air. The man was strangely dressed in a
close-fitting suit of cloth--something between the uniform of bicycle
clubs and the tights affected by acrobats. Long, thin, gray locks fell
back from a high yellow forehead: there was