"Aw, what's de use talkin' like dat?" shouted the voice. "There's a Chinese girl in de house dis minute."
"Quite true," admitted Kendrick candidly. "The poor creature was wounded, and we took her in to save her from the highbinders. You surely wouldn't have us turn her out. She's not a servant. She's a guest."
The explanation was lost on half the crowd in the clamor that had been raised. One of the mob leaders shouted:
"Where there's a Chinese girl there's a dozen Chinese men,"--an opinion that renewed the jeers and catcalls.
"Aw, the place is full of coolies! Smoke 'em out!" cried another, waving a torch.
Even with this renewal of hostile sentiment, the leaders of the mob would scarce have been able to spur their followers to violence but for the arrival of a reinforcement of another hundred hoodlums, shouting, swearing, and laden with the spoil of looted wash-houses. They came straight for the Kendrick house, and I had no doubt that they were directed thither by the same mind that had sent the first company to the siege.
While the play between Kendrick and the mob had been going on, I had edged my way toward the steps by those alternate arts of diplomatic and aggressive pressure which enable one to make progress through a crowd. The arrival of the hoodlum reinforcement brought me assistance as unwelcome as it was unexpected.
Wharton Kendrick faced the new-comers with a confident smile, and appealed with a jest to "the gentlemen in a hurry" for a hearing. But the hoodlum arrivals had not fallen under the spell of his personality, and their courage and wrath had been inflamed by their success in their wash-house raids. With shouts of "Gangway! gangway! Smoke out the coolies!" they charged forward in a wedge that struck the standing crowd directly behind me. There was a shock of meeting bodies, a grunt that might have come from a giant in sudden distress, and the crowd crumpled together like the telescoping cars of a railroad collision; the men in the center were lifted off their feet, and the crowd was forced forward and scattered in disorder.
Standing directly in the line of shock, I was thrown forward with amazing force, scraped against the stone wall, and flung headlong on to the lower step of the flight that led to Wharton Kendrick's garden. At the same moment there was an outburst of wrathful yells, and a shower of stones rattled about me. I felt a smart crack from a falling stick on my shoulder as I scrambled to my feet, and looking upward I was just in time to see Kendrick struck by a flying missile, reel backward, fling up his arms with a whirling motion, and fall heavily on to the grass.
I faced about and whipped out my revolver, when: