They ran forward and were suddenly in a narrow street of tall, old business buildings. It was a gut of darkness in which the men stumbled and jostled each other, and now they heard an alarm-siren ahead.
Wales had no desire at all to become embroiled in this senseless struggle for an empty city. But with Lanterman just ahead, and men all around, he dared not try to slip away. Some of them were surely watching him.
They debouched into a broader street. A few blocks away along this wider avenue, a searchlight suddenly went into action, lighting up shop windows and building-fronts for a quarter-mile, and half-dazzling the dark, running figures of Lanterman's men. Instantly shots burst forth from beyond the searchlight. Bullets whined and whanged off stone-work, and there was the silvery crash of shattered plate-glass.
"Get back in here!" Lanterman yelled, and his men sucked back into the dark shelter of the narrower way.
One of them was holding his shoulder, and sobbing, "Damn them, they hit me—"
Wales, pressing close against a stone facade, looked out into the eery brilliance ahead and recognized it as Liberty Avenue. He saw, across it, a shopwindow in which impeccably dressed dummies looked out as though in wide-eyed amazement at what was going on.
Lanterman paid no attention to the wounded man. "They're up in that big hotel near the Post Office," he said quickly. "Can't be many men left here—but we got to get to them fast, before the others hear and start back."
He told one of the farmer-men,
"You, Milton—take a dozen men and get around to the back of that hotel. Rest of us will take it from the front."
Wales thought that however ignorant he might be in some ways, Lanterman was a born leader. No wonder that people who had been bewildered and lost in doubts followed the red-faced man.