The flying figure struck among the rest, head on, to a growling chorus of oaths, imprecations. But still they came on, thrusting, lunging; a gun crashed almost in Quarrier’s face.... There came a voice:
“No shooting, you fool! Th’ Big Gun says—”
The rest was lost as the pistol clattered to the cobbles. The center of a whirling tangle of fist and foot, to Quarrier it seemed that he fought in a nightmare that would have no end. He had gone to one knee under the impact of a swinging blow, when, from the far distance, there sounded the rolling rattle of a night-stick, with the clangor of the patrol.
Something gripped his ankle—something at once soft and hard. He lunged, full length, as a football player at the last desperate urge of his spent strength. Then he was on his feet, running, side-stepping, circling with the skill and desperate effort of a plunging half-back, stiff-arming the opposition to right and left.
Just ahead, the black maw of an alley, a deeper blot of blackness, loomed. In its heart, like a witch-fire, there swam upward a nebulous, faint glow as from the pit; out of the tail of his eye he saw it: The dim loom of a house, and an open door.
He reached the turn—and a figure uprose before him, even in that darkness brutish, broad, thewed like a grizzly. The great arm rose, once; it fell, like the hammer of Thor.
Quarrier lurched, stiffened, buckling inward at the knees in a loose-jointed, slumping fall.
II.
Hangman’s Hold.
QUARRIER came to himself, all his faculties at full tide.
It was smothering dark—a darkness not merely of the night but of a prison-house, silent, musty with the stale odor of decay and death. Near at hand, after a moment, he heard a slow, ceaseless dripping, like the beating of a heart, or the slow drip-drip of a life that was running out, drop by single drop.