IT was when Stanley had turned off the main thoroughfare, with its electric lights and thronging promenaders, into a labyrinth of dark and small streets, that he realized he had lost his way.
He could have turned around and come back to the broad, well-lighted avenue he had just left, but that was not Stanley Downs’ way, for he rather enjoyed wandering about cities without any clear notion of where he was going, only to find himself at last on some familiar thoroughfare.
“I have nothing particular to do this evening,” he told himself. “I don’t think I want any regular dinner, and I shall go to bed after a while. So I will just keep going till I come out somewhere I know.”
He strolled through the dark streets for another ten minutes, without coming to any landmark he recognized. Always behind him crept the shadows of the two gangsters, and both held in their hands short clubs of some kind.
“Ah! I see bright lights at the end of this street at last!” muttered Stanley. “I knew I’d work out of this muddle, sooner or later. Glad of it, for this darkness and the rough sidewalks are getting monotonous.”
He had stood at the mouth of a dark and forbidding alleyway as he gazed at the reflection of the lights some three blocks ahead.
He laughed at himself for being lost in a city that he knew fairly well, and had started to walk on, when a soft shuffling sound behind made him swing around, with an instinctive feeling that he must protect himself from some sudden danger.
It was this instinct that caused him to raise both arms in an attitude of defense. Also it prevented his being struck on the head.
A blackjack came down rather hard on his left arm, while another weapon of the same kind which menaced him on the right called for immediate action.
Stanley Downs was used to fighting in all sorts of ways. Not only was he a finished scientific boxer, but he had had experience in the brutal pastime of “rough and tumble” many times.