The Lost House

by Richard Harding Davis

An instant later there was a scream of anger and on a line where Ford would have been, had he knelt to shove the envelope under the door, three bullets splintered through the panel.

At the same moment the girl caught him by the wrist. Unheeding the attack upon the door, her eyes were fixed upon the windows. With her free hand she pointed at the one at which Ford had first appeared. The blind was still raised a few inches, and they saw that the night was lit with a strange and brilliant radiance. The storm had passed, and from all the houses that backed upon the one in which they were prisoners lights blazed from every window, and in each were crowded many people, and upon the roof-tops in silhouette from the glare of the street lamps below, and in the yards and clinging to the walls that separated them, were hundreds of other dark, shadowy groups changing and swaying. And from them rose the confused, inarticulate, terrifying murmur of a mob. It was as though they were on a race-track at night facing a great grandstand peopled with an army of ghosts. With the girl at his side, Ford sprang to the window and threw up the blind, and as they clung to the bars, peering into the night, the light in the room fell full upon them. And in an instant from the windows opposite, from the yards below, and from the house-tops came a savage, exultant yell of welcome, a confusion of cries' orders, entreaties, a great roar of warning. At the sound, Ford could feel the girl at his side tremble.

“What does it mean?” she cried.

“Cuthbert has raised the neighborhood!” shouted Ford jubilantly. “Or else”—he cried in sudden enlightenment—“those shots we heard.”

The girl stopped him with a low cry of fear. She thrust her arms between the bars and pointed. In the yard below them was the sloping roof of the kitchen. It stretched from the house to the wall of the back yard. Above the wall from the yard beyond rose a ladder, and, face down upon the roof, awry and sprawling, were the motionless forms of two men. Their shining capes and heavy helmets proclaimed their calling.

“The police!” exclaimed Ford. “And the shots we thought were for those in the house were for THEM! This is what has happened,” he whispered eagerly: “Prothero attacked Cuthbert. Cuthbert gets away and goes to the police. He tells them you are here a prisoner, that I am here probably a prisoner, and of the attack upon himself. The police try to make an entrance from the street—that was the first shot we heard—and are driven back; then they try to creep in from the yard, and those poor devils were killed.”

As he spoke a sudden silence had fallen, a silence as startling as had been the shout of warning. Some fresh attack upon the house which the prisoners could not see, but which must be visible to those in the houses opposite was going forward.

“Perhaps they are on the roof,”' whispered Ford joyfully. “They'll be through the trap in a minute, and you'll be free!”

“No!” said the girl.

She also spoke in a whisper, as though she feared Prothero might hear her. And with her hand she again pointed. Cautiously above the top of the ladder appeared the head and shoulders of a man. He wore a policeman's helmet, but, warned by the fate of his comrades, he came armed. Balancing himself with his left hand on the rung of the ladder, he raised the other and pointed a revolver. It was apparently at the two prisoners, and Miss Dale sprang to one side.