“Get out of here, Ned, while you can. There will be the devil to pay before midnight, and there is no earthly use in your being mixed up in it.”
Hobart leaned over the table and placed a coin on one of the inlaid cards to keep up appearances.
“I’m here with you, and I mean to stay,” he insisted. “You may need— By Jove! it’s begun.”
The dance stopped and the clamour sank into a hush, which was sharply rent by a blast of profanity, a jangling crash of the piano keys, and a woman’s scream. Then the two fought their way into the thick of the crowd around the piano. A drunken ruffian was grasping the woman’s arm and brandishing a revolver over her head.
“You won’t play it, won’t ye? And ye’ll give Ike Gasset a piece of yer lip? By God, I’ll show ye!”
Brant’s pistol was out before he spoke. “Drop it right where you are, and get out of here before I kill you,” he said quietly.
The man’s reply was a snap shot in Brant’s face, and, though his aim was bad, both Hobart and Brant felt the wind of the bullet passing between them. The crack of the pistol was the signal for a scene a description of which no man has ever yet been able to set down calmly in black on white. Shouts, oaths, a mad rush for the open air foiled by a fiercer closing in of the crowd around the piano; all this while the ruffian levelled his weapon and fired again. At the death-speeding instant the woman started to her feet, and the bullet intended for Brant struck her fairly in the breast. Hobart heard the sharp snap of the steel corset stay, and saw Brant, catching her as she reeled, fire once, twice, thrice at the desperado. Then the assayer lifted up his voice in a shout that dominated the tumult:
“Silverettes! Out with them—they’ve killed a woman!”
There was a fierce affray, a surging charge, and when the place was cleared Hobart ran back. Brant was on his knees beside the woman. The smoking oil lamps burned yellow in the powder reek, but there was light enough to show that she was past help. None the less, Hobart offered to go for a doctor.
Brant shook his head and rose stiffly.