Matters would have been much worse with me, indeed, but for one stroke of luck. One of the crowd, a grimy, vile-smelling creature, in his eagerness to get a kick at my head fell asprawl over me as I lay against the wall; I grabbed him tight and hung on to him, using his fat carcass as a shield until his piercing screams for help let his friends see what was happening.
The attack ceased while they dragged him free. I managed to scramble to my feet at the same time, and with my back to the wall I used my fists right and left upon the front rank of hot, straining, sweating, staring faces in a desperate effort to win a way back to the stairs.
Against such numbers I could gain no more than a moment’s respite, however. But it proved enough.
A revolver shot rang out from the stairway and drew all eyes that way.
It was Volna.
Running from the room above she had seen my pistol on the stairs and her quick wits had suggested to her the means of stopping the tumult. She had discharged it over the heads of the crowd and had thus gained a hearing.
Her lovely face flushed and her eyes alight with indignation, she used the moment of astonishment to dash right into the midst of the crowd and reach my side.
“Shame, men, shame,” she cried. “Would you tear your friends to pieces? I am one of the prisoners and this is the other.”
The fickleness of a mob is a proverb. Her plucky act succeeded where all arguments and inducements would have failed. The crowd swung over to her side and cheered her lustily.
Burski was quick to appreciate the probable results to him; and I saw him begin to edge his way to the door to escape.