“Excellent! Then, if you will run on ahead and have the door of it open for me and everything ready so that we may whisk him in and be off like a shot, and Mr. Trent will let one of these good chaps here run down to the man’s room and fetch him a hat, I’ll attend to his removal.”
“Here’s one here, sir, that’ll do at a pinch and save time,” suggested one of the men, picking up a cavalryman’s hat from the wreck of the ruined tableau and dusting it by slapping it against his thigh. “I don’t think he’ll resist much, sir; he seems to have gone clear off his biscuit and not to know enough for that; but if you’d like me and my mate to lend a hand——”
“No, thanks; I shall be able to manage him myself, I fancy,” said Cleek, serenely. “Get him on his feet, please. That’s the business! Now then, Mr. Narkom nip off; I’m following.”
Mr. Narkom “nipped off” without an instant’s delay, and two minutes later saw him slipping out through the rear door of the building with Cleek and the jabbering, unresisting prisoner at the bottom of the last flight of stairs not twenty yards behind.
But the passage of the next half minute saw something of more moment still; for, as Narkom ran on tiptoe up the dim alley to the waiting limousine standing at its western end, and unlatching the vehicle’s door, swung it open to be ready for Cleek, out of the stillness there roared suddenly the shrill note of a dog-whistle, and all in a moment there was—mischief.
A crowd of quick-moving Apache figures sprang up from sheltering doors and, scudding past him, headed full tilt down the narrow alley, calling out as they ran that piercing “La, la, loi!” which is the war cry of their kind.
A blind rage—all the more maddening in that it was impotent, since he had neither weapon to defend nor the power to slay—swept down upon the superintendent as he realized the import of that mad rush, and, ducking down his head, he bolted after them, into the thick of them—punching, banging, slogging, shouting, swearing—an incarnate Passion, the Epitome of Man’s love for Man—a little fat Fury that was all a whirl of flying fists as it swept onward and that seemed to go absolutely insane at what he looked up the alley and saw.
“Get back, Cleek! Get back, for God’s sake!” he yelled, in a very panic of fear and dismay; then cleft his way with beating arms and kicking feet through the hampering crowd, arrowed out of its midst, and bore down upon the cavalry-hatted figure that had stepped out of the dark doorway of Trent & Son’s building and was standing flattened against the rear wall of it.
He reached out his hand and made a blind clutch at it, and, while he was yet far out of reaching distance of it, faced round and made a wild effort to cover it with his short, fat body and his arms outflung, like a crucifix, and looked at the Apaches and swore without one thought of being profane.
“Me, you damned devils! Me, me, not him! Not him, damn you! damn you! damn you!” he cried, hoarse-throated and—said no more!