“A bit keyed-up. This damned fog . . .”
“You may live to bless it. If for any reason we don’t both get through, we’ll say good-bye now. Slow down a bit; we can’t be more than fifty yards from the corner.”
Though I fancied we were still half a mile away, I discovered—by the abrupt change from stucco to brick—that we had indeed reached the south side of the house. So far as I could see or hear, the neighbourhood was deserted; but a single distant thud, followed by a sharp tinkle, told me that some one on the other side of the house had broken a window and that the missile had been stopped by a shutter. I heard hurried footsteps and pulled up within an inch of colliding with a young policeman. His truncheon was drawn; and he had lost his helmet.
“You gentlemen had best keep out of this,” he warned us.
“What’s happening?,” I asked. “Are these the hunger-marchers?”
“I reckon so. And they’re out for mischief. If you could see them, it wouldn’t be so bad . . .”
He broke off as a fusillade of stones rattled against the house. A hollow ‘plump’, like the sound of a weight dropped into water, indicated another broken window; and in the moment’s silence that followed we heard another tinkle of glass.
“The house will stand a good deal of that,” O’Rane murmured. “They’ve had no luck with the door?”
“Two or three got in by the area window,” stated the constable. “Now they can’t get out again. There are two men waiting for them.”
O’Rane broke into an unexpected laugh: