the night before run in so
unusual an excitement, and strolled out into the empty dawn-lit main
road, looking vaguely for a cab. He saw nothing in the vacant space
except a blue-and-gold glittering thing, running very fast, which
looked at first like a very tall beetle, but turned out, to his great
astonishment, to be Barker.

"Have you heard the good news?" asked that gentleman.

"Yes," said Quin, with a measured voice. "I have heard the glad
tidings of great joy. Shall we take a hansom down to Kensington? I see
one over there."

They took the cab, and were, in four minutes, fronting the ranks of
the multitudinous and invincible army. Quin had not spoken a word all
the way, and something about him had prevented the essentially
impressionable Barker from speaking either.

The great army, as it moved up Kensington High Street, calling many
heads to the numberless windows, for it was long indeed--longer than
the lives of most of the tolerably young--since such an army had been
seen in London. Compared with the vast organisation which was now
swallowing up the miles, with Buck at its head as leader, and the King
hanging at its tail as journalist, the whole story of our problem was
insignificant. In the presence of that army the red Notting Hills and
the green Bayswaters were alike tiny and straggling groups. In its
presence the whole struggle round Pump Street was like an ant-hill
under the hoof of an ox. Every man who felt or looked at that
infinity of men knew that it was the triumph of Buck's brutal
arithmetic. Whether Wayne was right or wrong, wise or foolish, was
quite a fair matter for discussion. But it was a matter of history. At
the foot of Church Street, opposite Kensington Church, they paused in
their glowing good humour.

"Let us send some kind of messenger or herald up to them," said Buck,
turning to Barker and the King. "Let us send and ask them to cave in
without more muddle."

"What shall we say to them?" said Barker, doubtfully.

"The facts of the case are quite sufficient," rejoined Buck. "It is
the facts of the case that make an army surrender. Let us simply say
that our army that is fighting their army, and their army that is
fighting our army, amount altogether to about a thousand men. Say that
we have four thousand. It is very simple. Of the thousand fighting,
they have at the very most, three hundred, so that, with those three
hundred, they have now to fight four thousand seven hundred men.