“Oh, no, you won’t.” Allerton looked round for the policeman who occasionally passed that way; but though a lighted car crashed down Madison Avenue there was no one in sight. He might have called in the hope of waking the men upstairs, but that seemed cowardly. Though in a physical encounter with a ruffian like this he could hardly help getting the worst of it—especially in his state of half intoxication—it was the encounter itself that he loathed, even more than the defeat. “Oh, no, you won’t,” he repeated, taking one step upward, and turning to defend his premises. “I don’t mean that you shall come into this house, or ever see the girl again, if I can prevent it.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Then take that.”
The words were so quickly spoken, and the blow in his face so unexpected, that Rash staggered backwards. Being on a step he had little or no footing, and having been drinking his balance was the more quickly lost.
“And that!”
A second blow in the face sent him down like a stone, without a struggle or a cry.
He fell limply on his back, his feet slipping to the sidewalk, his body sagging on the steps like a bit of string, accidentally dropped there. The hat, which fell off, remained on the step beside the head it had been covering.
The man leaped backward, as if surprised at his own deed. He looked this way and that, to see if 308 he had been observed. A lighted car crashed up Madison Avenue, but otherwise the street remained empty. Creeping nearer the steps he bent over his victim, whose left hand lay helpless and outstretched. Timidly, gingerly, he put his fingers to the pulse, starting back from it with a shock. He spoke but two words, but he spoke them half aloud.