With a deep oath the doctor strode forward, and Duke saw him. In an instant, with a cry of different tone—a shriek of terror—he spun me from him, sprung past the other, drove the girl screaming into the passage, and was gone.
“Stop! By all——”
The doctor’s exclamation was for me. I had staggered back, but an immediate fear drove me, with no time for explanation, to hurried pursuit.
“Out of the way!” I cried, violently; “he mustn’t escape!”
He would have barred my passage. I came against him with a shock that sent him reeling. As his hands clutched vainly in the air I rushed from the room and from the house.
With my first plunge into the street a weltering stream of fire ran across the sky, and in a moment an explosive crash shook the city like the bursting open of the gates of torment.
Amid flood and storm and the numbing slam of thunder the tragedy of the night was drawing to its close.
CHAPTER LIX.
INTO THE DEPTHS.
Momentarily I saw—a black mote in that flickering violet transparency—the figure of Duke as he ran before me bobbing up and down like the shadow of the invisible man. Drawn by a sure instinct, he was heading for the mill, and every nerve must I strain to overtake him, now goaded by fear and triumph to maniacal frenzy.
But half the distance was covered when the rain swept down in one blinding sheet, that lashed the gutters into froth a foot high and numbed the soul with its terrific uproar.