Toffee, like an Olympic runner in the last stretch, darted swiftly from the shadows and scooped the weapon from the floor. This time she held it correctly.
"Stand back!" she yelled blood thirstily, slipping into what she believed to be the spirit of the occasion. "I'll blow his ugly head off!"
The doctor, unexpectedly confronted by this chilling display of feminine willingness to mayhem, became instantly docile. "Don't shoot!" he pleaded.
Marc released him and moved toward Toffee. He took the gun from her and held it levelly on Herrigg. "Let's go, Herrigg," he said. "Let's join the sheriff."
"You can't do this!" the doctor protested frantically. "You can't!"
"No?" Marc asked, nodding toward the door. "Just step right this way."
There was a general movement toward the outer passage, but it was suddenly arrested like an abrupt foot-fall in the dark that had reached for a stairway too soon. The party, quarry and hunters alike, suddenly froze, as a wild baying echoed weirdly through the outer tunnel.
"Monsters!" Toffee screamed with sincerest terror.
And in the next moment it seemed that she was right. Two sets of fiendish, glowing eyes appeared in the doorway, and below them, in appropriate places, were two wide, slavering mouths. This paralyzing spectacle was presently explained, though made no more lovely, as the eyes and mouths, advancing, proved to be the formidable property of two giant bloodhounds. They were straining against a couple of taut chain leashes at whose ends was a single, mammoth hand. It was the hand of Sheriff Miller. He surveyed the transfixed party with triumphant eyes.
"Here they are boys!" he called out loudly. "Come and get 'em!"