y of anger. He
narrowed, and, so to speak, tightened his operations: he fenced (as the
swordsman's boast goes), in a wedding ring; he turned Turnbull's thrusts
with a maddening and almost mechanical click, like that of a machine.
Whenever Turnbull's sword sought to go over that other mere white streak
it seemed to be caught in a complex network of steel. He turned one
thrust, turned another, turned another. Then suddenly he went forward at
the lunge with his whole living weight. Turnbull leaped back, but
Evan lunged and lunged and lunged again like a devilish piston rod or
battering ram. And high above all the sound of the struggle there broke
into the silent evening a bellowing human voice, nasal, raucous, at the
highest pitch of pain. "Help! Help! Police! Murder! Murder!" The gag was
broken; and the tongue of terror was loose.

"Keep on!" gasped Turnbull. "One may be killed before they come."

The voice of the screaming shopkeeper was loud enough to drown not only
the noise of the swords but all other noises around it, but even through
its rending din there seemed to be some other stir or scurry. And Evan,
in the very act of thrusting at Turnbull, saw something in his eyes that
made him drop his sword. The atheist, with his grey eyes at their
widest and wildest, was staring straight over his shoulder at the little
archway of shop that opened on the street beyond. And he saw the archway
blocked and blackened with strange figures.

"We must bolt, MacIan," he said abruptly. "And there isn't a damned
second to lose either. Do as I do."

With a bound he was beside the little cluster of his clothes and boots
that lay on the lawn; he snatched them up, without waiting to put any of
them on; and tucking his sword under his other arm, went wildly at
the wall at the bottom of the garden and swung himself over it. Three
seconds after he had alighted in his socks on the other side, MacIan
alighted beside him, also in his socks and also carrying clothes and
sword in a desperate bundle.

They were in a by-street, very lean and lonely itself, but so close to
a crowded thoroughfare that they could see the vague masses of vehicles
going by, and could even see an individual hansom cab passing the
corner at the instant. Turnbull put his fingers to his mouth like a
gutter-snipe and whistled twice. Even as he did so he could hear the
loud voices of the neighbours and the police coming down the garden.

The hansom swung sharply and ca