"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member. Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."
She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night the death of traitors."
"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!—Alieni! And capital A's! It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do with us!"
Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps, have sent Miss Hope upstairs."
"Oh, I beseech you—anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"
"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"
Silence grew up in their midst.
The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the slats give and the glass crash in!
"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front windows—Lord, who's this?"
The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and joined their council.