A stillness had struck the noisier babble and Harry's mental connection on a sudden broke. A young woman in the red Jersey and poke-bonnet of the Salvation Army had passed about the room and was now standing by the table. She stretched her tambourine. "If you please, gentlemen," she said.
Harry laid a silver half-dollar in her tambourine and his companion did the same, when the waiter who had served them spoke to her: "Clear out, you. You've got your money, now go."
"And be quick about it!" said Harry, distinctly.
The remark had not the excuse of proprietorship and it roused fury in the sluggish minds about them to whom the addition was extraneous and gratuitous, a smug insult of one who from his manner belonged to a class that despised them, offered to one whose daily habit proved that she did not. With an oath the drunken teamster of the pock-marked visage lurched forward, rolling a red-flannel sleeve along a hairy biceps.
The dingy Ganymede thrust him back. "Leave him to me!" he ground savagely, and turning, struck at Harry with envenomed force.
The fist, however, did not reach home. Harry's brain and eye were working with the deadly precision of the practised athlete. The suggestion of combat was complete, and with sober caution and reason dead, the bodily mechanism rushed to meet it. There was a lightning-like parry—a crisp, smashing return blow. Then suddenly the room turned a shambles, a red surging mass of hands that tore, of thrown missiles, of shattering glass, through which sounded a shrill whistle and the tattoo of a thorn-baton on the pavement outside.
Two minutes later Harry stood unhurt in the open air, and a blue-jacket held the door against a cursing pandemonium. "Run, you fool!" he panted. "I can't hold it but a minute. Run!"
And Harry ran. Not from fear or dread, but in instant response to that mental spur, without reason, or logic, or conscious thought. The new mental formula for the present moment superseded the old. The dingy saloon, the effervescent young Thespian, the fight—all fell away, were gone, and there was only the rigid empty calm through which he sped, and far above him the sound of a wind like a silken sea. It was close on midnight, the more decorous streets into which he presently emerged deserted, for intermittent clouds were now blotting the moonlight and a sprinkle of rain was falling. The sparse pedestrians stared or shrank away, but none followed, no patrolling guardian of the law forbade. He ran without direction or purpose, until suddenly—he halted.
He had come to the side of a great enclosure, the grounds of a mansion, surrounded by a high stone wall with tiled top, in which was set a gate with tall posts holding dim-lit yellow globes. It was not at these, however, that Harry was looking; his gaze went beyond, where, touched by the rainy moonlight, stretched the long façade of a Colonial house with a wide oval porch. At one side was a wing, with a lattice climbing over its doorway, and the damp air was full of the scent of jessamine.
He stiffened. The contours fell with fateful correspondence over another picture which had been etched on his brain that night with the sharp outlines of a photographic plate. The old spring had been touched, and the eerie mechanism was responding. It was his own house, but now it sheltered the Great What Ho, and in that wing was hidden the thing he must secure for his own salvation!