He saw
nothing of them.

CHAPTER VI

_Blind Man's Buff_

Wilson undoubtedly would have been stopped by the police within three
blocks had it not been for the seriousness of his lean face and the
evident earnestness with which he was hurrying about his business. As
it was, he gathered a goodly sized crowd of street gamins who hooted
at his heels until he was forced to take to the side streets. Here for
a few squares he was not annoyed. The thing that was most disturbing
him was the realization that he knew neither the name of the street
nor the number of the house into which he had so strangely come last
night. He knew its general direction--it lay beyond the Public Gardens
and backed upon the water front, but that was all. With only this
vague description he could not ask for help without exciting all
manner of suspicion. He must depend upon his instinct. The situation
seemed to him like one of those grotesque predicaments of a dream. Had
his brain been less intently occupied than it was with the urgency of
his mission, he would have suffered acutely.

He could not have had a worse section of the city to traverse--his
course led him through the business district, where he passed oddly
enough as a fantastic advertisement for a tea house,--but he kept
doggedly on until he reached Tremont Street. Here he was beset by a
fresh crowd of urchins from the Common who surrounded him until they
formed the nucleus of a crowd. For the first time, his progress was
actually checked. This roused within him the same dormant, savage man
who had grasped the joist--he turned upon the group. He didn't do
much, his eyes had been upon the ground and he raised them, throwing
back his head quickly.

"Let me through," he said.

A few, even at that, shifted to one side, but a half dozen larger boys
pressed in more closely, baiting him on. They had not seen in his eyes
what the others saw.

"I'm in a hurry," he said. "Let me through."

Some of the crowd laughed; some jeered. All of them waited expectantly.
Wilson took a short, quick breath. His frame stiffened, and then
without a word he hurled himself forward. He must have been half
mad, for as he bored a passage through, striking to the right and
left, he saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing. His teeth
together, his mind once again centered with burning intensity upon the
solitary fact that he must get back to the girl who had sent him out
to protect her. He was at this m