“Perhaps they have gone,” he heard someone say, whose voice was sonorous, “perhaps they have gone. Escaped by the window. There is no light there; and no sound.”
“Stop!” It was O’Hara speaking. “Listen!”
With an effort Grey squirmed to the edge of the couch and dropped his bound body to the floor with a thud that echoed through the silent room.
“Damn him!” he heard the bigger of his two companions hiss through his teeth.
From outside there came a yell of triumph; and then a heavy, crashing, catapultian mass fell upon the fragile portal. There was a crackling, splintering sound of wood rent apart, and through the aperture thus made, in the dim light of the single gas-jet in the passage, O’Hara came plunging with half a dozen of the hotel employés at his heels.
At the same instant a head disappeared below the sill of the window, and the rope from the bedpost was stretched taut and creaking with the weight of two descending bodies.
The Irishman, crossing the room in a flash, missed the form of his prostrate friend by a hair’s-breadth and dived headlong for the open casement. But quick as he was the fleeing scapegraces, realising their danger, were even more speedy. As his head shot out into the night the strain on the rope relaxed and there came up from the darkness below a patter of feet on the stone flagging of the alley. His pistol was in his hand and he fired once—twice—three times—blindly into the blackness beneath, guided only by the echo of those retreating footsteps.
Meanwhile, one of the Frenchmen—Baptiste, the waiter, by the way, who had told O’Hara that he saw Monsieur Arndt enter this room—was removing the gag from Grey’s mouth, while others were cutting the cords that bound his limbs. For a moment the American’s view of the Irishman’s broad back was cut off by those surrounding him, but the next minute he was on his feet and—but in that instant O’Hara had disappeared. Clutching the dangling rope, he had swung himself out of the window and had slid down nimbly in pursuit.
Grey’s impulse was to follow, but at the first step he reeled dizzily and would have fallen had not Baptiste thrown an arm about him and aided him to a chair. His head was aching splittingly and his legs and arms were numb. For a little while he was lost to everything save the racking torture of physical pain. Then the voluble, excited clatter of the men about him recalled him to a sense of what had happened.
“What are you standing here for?” he cried, vexedly. “Get down to the street, every one of you. Monsieur O’Hara may need you. Off, I say. Be quick!”