"Thin 'tis this waay thim murdherous divvles is b'atin' ut!"
"Gimme a back up that fince!..."
P. Sybarite picked himself up with even more alacrity that if he'd landed in a bed of nettles, tore across that terra-incognita, found a second fence, and was beyond it in a twinkling.
Swift as he was, however, detection attended him—a voice roaring: "There goes wan av thim now!"
Other voices chimed in spendthrift with suggestions and advice....
Blindly clearing fence after fence without even thinking to count them, P. Sybarite hurtled onward. Noises in the rear indicated a determined pursuit: once a voice whooped—"Halt or I fire!"—and a shot, waking echoes, sped the fugitive's heels....
But in time he had of necessity to pause for breath, and pulled up in the back-yard of a Forty-sixth Street residence, his duty—to find a way to the street and a shift from that uniform of unhappy inspiration—as plain as the problem it presented was obscure.
BURGLARY UNDER ARMS
And there P. Sybarite stood, near the middle of a fence-enclosed area of earth and flagstones; winded and weary; looking up and all around him in distressed perplexity; in a stolen coat (to be honest about it) and with six months' income from a million dollars unlawfully procured and secreted upon his person; wanted for resisting arrest and assaulting the minions of the law; hounded by a vengeful and determined posse; unacquainted with his whereabouts, ignorant of any way of escape from that hollow square, round whose sides window after excitable window was lighting up in his honour; all in all, as distressful a figure of a fugitive from justice as ever was on land or sea....