Chambers Robert William
The Dark Star

“No.”

“You are lying. You do understand. You take double wages; but it is not France you betray! Nor Russia!”

“Are you insane?”

“Almost. Where do you carry them?”

“What?”

“Answer quickly. Where? I tell you, I’ll expose you in another moment if you don’t answer me! Speak quickly!”

The other woman had turned a ghastly white; for a second or two she remained dumb, then, dry-lipped:

“Above – the knee,” she stammered; but there was scarcely a sound from the blanched lips that formed the words.

“Pistols?”

“Yes.”

“Loaded? Both of them?”

“Yes.”

“Clips?”

“No.”

“Unstrap them!”

The woman turned, bent almost double, twisting her supple body entirely around; but Ilse Dumont was at her side like a flash and caught her wrist as she withdrew her hand from the hem of her fluffy skirt.

“Now —take your life!” said Ilse Dumont between her teeth. “There’s the door! Go out!” – following her with blazing eyes – “Stop! Stand where you are until I come!”

Then she came quickly to where Neeland stood, astonished; and thrust two automatic pistols into his hands.

“Get Sengoun,” she whispered. “Don’t go down-stairs, for God’s sake. Get to the roof, if you can. Try – oh, try, try, Neeland, my friend!” Her voice trembled; she looked into his eyes – gave him, in that swift regard, all that a woman withholds until the right man asks.

Her lips quivered; she turned sharply on her heel, went to the outer hallway, where the other woman stood motionless.

“What am I to do with you?” demanded Ilse Dumont. “Do you think you are going out of here to summon the police? Mount those stairs!”

The woman dropped her hand on the banisters, heavily, set foot on the first stair, then slowly mounted as though her little feet in their dainty evening slippers were weighted with ball and chain.

Ilse Dumont followed her, opened a door in the passage, motioned her to enter. It was a bedroom that the electric light revealed. The woman entered and stood by the bed as though stupefied.

“I’ll keep my word to you,” said Ilse Dumont. “When it becomes too late for you to do us any mischief, I’ll return and let you go.”

And she stepped back across the threshold and locked the door on the outside.

As she did so, Neeland and Sengoun came swiftly up the stairs, and she beckoned them to follow, gathered the skirts of her evening gown into one hand, and ran up the stairs ahead of them to the fifth floor.

In the dim light Neeland saw that the top floor was merely a vast attic full of débris from the café on the ground floor – iron tables which required mending or repainting, iron chairs, great jars of artificial stone with dead baytrees standing in them, parts of rusty stoves and kitchen ranges, broken cutlery in boxes, cracked table china and heavier kitchen crockery in tubs which once had held flowers.

The only windows gave on a court. Through their dirty panes already the grey light of that early Sunday morning glimmered, revealing the contents of the shadowy place, and the position of an iron ladder hooked to two rings under the scuttle overhead.

Ilse Dumont laid her finger on her lips, conjuring silence, then, clutching her silken skirts, she started up the iron ladder, reached the top, and, exerting all her strength, lifted the hinged scuttle leading to the leads outside.

Instantly somebody challenged her in a guttural voice. She stood there a few moments in whispered conversation, then, from outside, somebody lowered the scuttle cover; the girl locked it, descended the iron ladder backwards, and came swiftly across to where Neeland and Sengoun were standing, pistols lifted.

“They’re guarding the roof,” she whispered, “ – two men. It is hopeless, that way.”

“The proper way,” said Sengoun calmly, “is for us to shoot our way out of this!”

The girl turned on him in a passion:

“Do you suppose I care what happens to you?” she said. “If there were no one else to consider you might do as you pleased, for all it concerns me!”

Sengoun reddened:

“Be silent, you treacherous little cat!” he retorted. “Do you imagine your riffraff are going to hold me here when I’m ready to depart! Me! A free Cossack! Bah!”

“Don’t talk that way, Sengoun,” said Neeland sharply. “We owe these pistols to her.”

“Oh,” muttered Sengoun, shooting a menacing glance at her. “I didn’t understand that.” Then his scowl softened and a sudden laugh cleared his face.

“I’m sorry, mademoiselle,” he said. “You’re quite welcome to your low opinion of me. But if anyone should ask me, I’d say that I don’t understand what is happening to us. And after a while I’ll become angry and go downstairs for information.”

“They know nothing about you in the salle de jeu,” she said, “but on the floor below they’re waiting to kill you.”

Neeland, astonished, asked her whether the American gamblers in the salon where Sengoun had been playing were ignorant of what was going on in the house.

“What Americans?” she demanded, incredulously. “Do you mean Weishelm?”

“Didn’t you know there were Americans employed in the salle de jeu?” asked Neeland, surprised.

“No. I have not been in this house for a year until I came tonight. This place is maintained by the Turkish Government – ” She flashed a glance at Sengoun – “you’re welcome to the information now,” she added contemptuously. And then, to Neeland: “There was, I believe, some talk in New York about adding one or two Americans to the personnel, but I opposed it.”

“They’re here,” said Neeland drily.

“Do you know who they are?”

“Yes. There’s a man called Doc Curfoot–”

“Who!!”

And suddenly, for the first time, Neeland remembered that she had been the wife of one of the men below.

“Brandes and Stull are the others,” he said mechanically.

The girl stared at him as though she did not comprehend, and she passed one hand slowly across her forehead and eyes.

“Eddie Brandes? Here? And Stull? Curfoot? Here in this house!”

“In the salon below.”

“They can’t be!” she protested in an odd, colourless voice. “They were bought soul and body by the British Secret Service!”

All three stood staring at one another; the girl flushed, clenched her hand, then let it fall by her side as though utterly overcome.

“All this espionage!” cried Sengoun, furiously. “ – It makes me sick, I tell you! Where everybody betrays everybody is no place for a free Cossack!–”

The terrible expression on the girl’s face checked him; she said, slowly:

“It is we others who have been betrayed, it seems. It is we who are trapped here. They’ve got us all – every one of us. Oh, my God! – every one of us – at last!”

She lifted her haggard face and stared at the increasing light which was turning the window panes a sickly yellow.

“With sunrise comes war,” she said in a stunned voice, as though to convince herself. “We are caught here in this house. And Kestner and Weishelm and Breslau and I–” she trembled, framing her burning face in slim hands that were like ice. “Do you understand that Brandes and Curfoot, bought by England, have contracted to deliver us to a French court martial?”

The men looked at her in silence.

“Kestner and Breslau knew they had been bought. One of our own people witnessed that treachery. But we never dreamed that these traitors would venture into this house tonight. We should have come here ourselves instead of going to the Turkish Embassy. That was Mahmud Damat’s meddling! His messenger insisted. God! What a mistake! What a deathly mistake for all of us!”

She leaned for a moment against one of the iron pillars which supported the attic roof, and covered her face with her hands.

After a moment, Neeland said:

“I don’t understand why you can’t leave this house if you are in danger. You say that there are men downstairs who are waiting to kill us – waiting only for Kestner and Breslau and Mahmud Damat to arrive.”

She said faintly:

“I did not before understand Mahmud’s delay. Now, I understand. He has been warned. Breslau and Kestner will not come. Otherwise, you now would be barricaded behind that breastwork of rubbish, fighting for your lives.”

“But you say there are men on the stairs below who are ready to kill us if we try to leave the house.”

“They, too, are trapped without knowing it. War will come with sunrise. This house has been under surveillance since yesterday afternoon. They have not closed in on us yet, because they are leaving the trap open in hopes of catching us all. They are waiting for Breslau and Kestner and Mahmud Damat… But they’ll never come, now… They are out of the city by this time… I know them. They are running for their lives at this hour… And we – we lesser ones – caught here – trapped – reserved for a French court martial and a firing squad in a barrack square!”

She shuddered and pressed her hands over her temples.

Neeland said:

“I am going to stand by you. Captain Sengoun will do the same.”

She shook her head:

“No use,” she said with a shiver. “I am too well known. They have my dossier almost complete. My procès will be a brief one.”

“Can’t you get away by the roof? There are two of your men up there.”

“They themselves are caught, and do not even know it. They too will face a squad of execution before the sun rises tomorrow. And they never dream of it up there–”

She made a hopeless gesture:

“What is the use! When I came here from the Turkish Embassy, hearing that you were here but believing the information false, I discovered you conversing with a Russian spy – overheard her warn you to leave this house.

“And there, all the while, unknown to me, in the salle de jeu were Curfoot and that unspeakable scoundrel Brandes! Why, the place was swarming with enemies – and I never dreamed it!.. Yet – I might have feared some such thing – I might have feared that the man, Brandes, who had betrayed me once, would do it again if he ever had the chance… And he’s done it.”

There was a long silence. Ilse stood staring at the melancholy greyish light on the window panes.

She said as though to herself:

“I shall never see another daybreak.”… After a moment she turned and began to pace the attic, a strange, terrible figure of haggard youth in the shadowy light. “How horribly still it is at daybreak!” she breathed, halting before Neeland. “How deathly quiet–”

The dry crack of a pistol cut her short. Then, instantly, in the dim depths of the house, shot followed shot in bewildering succession, faster, faster, filling the place with a distracting tumult.

Neeland jerked up his pistol as a nearer volley rattled out on the landing directly underneath.

Sengoun, exasperated, shouted:

“Well, what the devil is all this!” and ran toward the head of the stairs, his pistol lifted for action.

Then, in the garret doorway, Weishelm appeared, his handsome face streaming blood. He staggered, turned mechanically toward the stairs again with wavering revolver; but a shot drove him blindly backward and another hurled him full length across the floor, where he lay with both arms spread out, and the last tremors, running from his feet to his twitching face.

CHAPTER XXXIII
A RAT HUNT

The interior of the entire house was now in an uproar; shots came fast from every landing; the semi-dusk of stair-well and corridor was lighted by incessant pistol flashes and the whole building echoed the deafening racket.

“What do you make of it?” shouted Sengoun furiously, standing like a baited and perplexed bull. “Who’s fighting who in this fool of a place? By Erlik! I’d like to know whom I’m to fire at!”

Ilse Dumont, creeping along the wall, looked fearfully down at Weishelm who no longer moved where he lay on the dusty floor, with eyes and mouth open and his distorted face already half covered by a wet and crawling scarlet mask.

“Brandes and Stull are betraying us,” she whispered. “They are killing my comrades – on the stairs down there–”

“If that is true,” called out Neeland in a low, cautious voice, “you’d better wait a moment, Sengoun!”

But Sengoun’s rage for combat had already filled him to overflowing, and the last rag of patience left him.

“I don’t care who is fighting!” he bellowed. “It’s all one to me! Now is the time to shoot our way out of this. Come on, Neeland! Hurrah for the Terek Cossacks! Another town taken! Hurrah!”

Neeland caught Ilse by the wrist:

“You’d better get free of this house while you can!” he said, dragging her with him after Sengoun, who had already reached the head of the stairs and was starting down, peering about for a target.

Suddenly, on the landing below, Golden Beard and Ali Baba appeared, caught sight of Sengoun and Neeland above, and opened fire on them instantly, driving them back from the head of the staircase flat against the corridor wall. But Golden Beard, seeming to realise now that the garret landing was held and the way to the roof cut off, began to retreat from the foot of the garret stairs with Ali Baba following, their restless, upward-pointed pistols searching for the slightest movement in the semi-obscurity of the hallway above.

Sengoun, fuming and fretting, had begun to creep toward the head of the stairs again, when there came a rattling hail of shots from below, a rush, the trample of feet, the crash of furniture and startling slam of a door.

Downstairs straight toward the uproar ran Sengoun with Neeland beside him. The halls were swimming in acrid fumes; the floors trembled and shook under the shock as a struggling, fighting knot of men went tumbling down the stairway below, reached the landing and burst into the rooms of the Cercle Extranationale.

Leaning over the banisters, Neeland saw Golden Beard turn on Doc Curfoot, raging, magnificent as a Viking, his blue eyes ablaze. He hurled his empty pistol at the American; seized chairs, bronzes, andirons, the clock from the mantel, and sent a storm of heavy missiles through the doorway among the knot of men who were pressing him and who had already seized Ali Baba.

Then, from the banisters above, Neeland and Sengoun saw Brandes, moving stealthily, swiftly, edge his way to a further door.

Steadying the elbow of his pistol hand in the hollow cup of his left palm, his weapon level, swerving as his quarry moved, he presently fired at Golden Beard and got him through the back. And then he shot him again deliberately, through the body, as the giant turned, made a menacing gesture toward him; took an uncertain step in his direction; another step, wavering, blindly grotesque; then stood swaying there under the glare of the partly shattered chandelier from which hung long shreds of crystal prisms.

And Brandes, aiming once more with methodical and merciless precision, and taking what time he required to make a bull’s-eye on this great, reeling, golden-crowned bull, fired the third shot at his magnificent head.

The bronze Barye lion dropped from Golden Beard’s nerveless fist; the towering figure, stiffening, fell over rather slowly and lay across the velvet carpet as rigid as a great tree.

Brandes went into the room, leaned over the dying man and fired into his body until his pistol was empty. Then he replaced the exhausted clip leisurely, leering down at his victim.

There was a horrid sound from the stairs, where Curfoot and another man were killing a waiter. Strange, sinister faces appeared everywhere from the smoke-filled club rooms; Stull came out into the hallway below and shouted up through the stair-well:

“Say, Eddie! For Christ’s sake come down here! There’s a mob outside on the street and they’re tearing the iron shutters off the café!”

Curfoot immediately started downstairs; Brandes, pistol in hand, came slowly out of the club rooms, still leering, his slitted, greenish eyes almost phosphorescent in the semi-obscurity.

Suddenly he caught sight of Ilse Dumont standing close behind Sengoun and Neeland on the landing above.

“By God!” he shouted to Curfoot. “Here she is, Doc! Tell your men! Tell them she’s up here on the next floor!”

Sengoun immediately fired at Brandes, who did not return the shot but went plunging downstairs into the smoky obscurity below.

“Come on!” roared Sengoun to Neeland, starting forward with levelled weapon. “They’ve all gone crazy and it’s time we were getting out of this!”

“Quick!” whispered Neeland to Ilse Dumont. “Follow me downstairs! It’s the only chance for you now!”

But the passageway was blocked by a struggling, cursing, panting crowd, and they were obliged to retreat into the club rooms.

In the salle de jeu, Ali Baba, held fast by three men dressed as waiters, suddenly tripped up two of them, turned, and leaped for the doorway. The two men who had been tripped scrambled to their feet and tore after him. When they reached the hallway the Eurasian was gone; but all of a sudden there came the crash of a splintered door from the landing above; and the dim corridor rang with the frightful screaming of a woman.

“It’s – that – that – Russian girl!” stammered Ilse Dumont; “ – The girl I locked in! Oh, my God! – my God! Karl Breslau is killing her!”

Neeland sprang into the hall and leaped up the stairs; but the three men disguised as waiters had arrived before him.

And there, across the threshold of the bedroom, backed up flat against the shattered door, Ali Baba was already fighting for his life; and the frightened Russian girl crept out from the bedroom behind him and ran to Neeland for protection.

Twice Neeland aimed at Ali Baba, but could not bring himself to fire at the bleeding, rabid object which snarled and slavered and bit and kicked, regardless of the blows raining on him. At last one of his assailants broke the half demented creature’s arm with a chair; and the bloody, battered thing squeaked like a crippled rat and darted away amid the storm of blows descending, limping and floundering up the attic stairs, his broken arm flapping with every gasping bound.

After him staggered his sweating and exhausted assailants, reeling past Neeland and Ilse Dumont and the terrified Russian girl who crouched behind them. But, halfway up the stairs all three halted and stood clinging to the banisters as though listening to something on the floor above them.

Neeland heard it, too: from the roof came a ripping, splintering sound, as though people on the slates were prying up the bolted scuttle. The three men on the stairs hesitated a moment longer; then turned to flee, too late; a hail of pistol shots swept the attic stairs; all three men came pitching and tumbling down to the landing.

Two of them lay still; one rose immediately and limped on again down the hallway, calling over the banisters to those below:

“The Germans on the leads ’ave busted into the garret! Breslau is up ’ere! Send along those American gunmen, or somebody what can shoot!”

He was a grey-haired Englishman, smooth shaven and grim; and, as he stood there at the head of the further stairs, breathing heavily, awaiting aid from below, he said to Neeland coolly enough:

“You’d better go below, sir. We ’ad our orders to take this Breslau rat alive, but we can’t do it now, and there’s like to be a ’orrid mess ’ere directly.”

“Can we get through below?”

“You can,” said the man significantly, “but they’ll be detaining one o’ them ladies at the door.”

“Do you mean me?” said Ilse Dumont.

“Yes, ma’am, I do–”

She sprang toward the attic stairway, but the British agent whipped out a pistol and covered her.

“No,” he said grimly. “You’re wanted below. Go down!”

She came slowly back to where Neeland was standing.

“You’ll have to take your chance below,” he said under his breath. “I’ll stand by you to the end.”

She smiled and continued on toward the stairs where the English agent stood. Neeland and the Russian girl followed her.

The agent said:

“There’s ’ell to pay below, sir.”

The depths of the house rang with the infernal din of blows falling on iron shutters. A deeper, more sinister roar rose from the mob outside. There was a struggle going on inside the building, too; Neeland could hear the trampling and surging of men on every floor – voices calling from room to room, shouts of anger, the terrible outcry of a man in agony.

“Wot a rat’s nest, then, there was in this here blessed ’ouse, sir!” said the British agent, coolly. “If we get Breslau and the others on the roof we’ve bagged ’em all.”

The Russian girl was trembling so violently that Neeland took her by the arm. But Ilse Dumont, giving her a glance of contempt, moved calmly past the British agent to the head of the stairway.

“Come,” she said to Neeland.

The agent, leaning over the banisters, shouted to a man on the next floor:

“Look sharp below there! I’m sendin’ Miss Dumont down with Mr. Neeland, the American! Take her in charge, Bill!”

“Send her along!” bawled the man, framing his face with both hands. “Keep Breslau on the roof a bit and we’ll ’ave the beggar in a few moments!”

Somebody else shouted up from the tumult below:

“It’s war, ’Arry! ’Ave you ’eard? It’s war this morning! Them ’Uns ’as declared war! And the perlice is a-killin’ of the Apaches all over Paris!”

Ilse Dumont looked curiously at the agent, calmly at Neeland, then, dropping one hand on the banisters, she went lightly down the stairs toward the uproar below, followed by Neeland and the Russian girl clinging to his arm with both desperate little hands.

The British agent hung far over the banisters until he saw his colleague join them on the floor below; then, reassured, and on guard again, he leaned back against the corridor wall, his pistol resting on his thigh, and fixed his cold grey eyes on the attic stairs once more.

The secret agent who now joined Neeland and Ilse Dumont on the fourth floor had evidently been constructing a barricade across the hallway as a precaution in case of a rush from the Germans on the roof.

Chairs and mattresses, piled shoulder high, obstructed the passageway, blocking the stairs; and the secret agent – a very young man with red hair and in the garb of a waiter – clambered over it, revolver in one hand, a pair of handcuffs in the other. He lost his balance on top of the shaky heap; strove desperately to recover it, scrambled like a cat in a tub, stumbled, rolled over on a mattress.

And there Neeland pinned him, closing his mouth with one hand and his throat with the other, while Ilse Dumont tore weapon and handcuffs from his grasp, snapped the latter over his wrists, snatched the case from a bedroom pillow lying among the mattresses, and, with Neeland’s aid, swathed the struggling man’s head in it.

“Into that clothes-press!” whispered Ilse, pointing along the hallway where a door swung open.

“Help me lift him!” motioned Neeland.

Together they got him clear of the shaky barricade and, lugging him between them, deposited him on the floor of the clothes-press and locked the door.

So silent had they been that, listening, they heard no movement from the watcher on the floor above, who stood guard at the attic stairs. And it was evident he had heard nothing to make him suspicious.

The Russian girl, dreadfully pale, leaned against the wall as though her limbs scarcely supported her. Neeland passed his arm under hers, nodded to Ilse Dumont, and started cautiously down the carpeted stairs, his automatic pistol in one hand, and the revolver taken from the imprisoned secret agent clutched tightly in the other.

Down the stairs they crept, straight toward the frightful tumult still raging below – down past the wrecked club rooms; past a dead man sprawling on the landing across the blood-soaked carpet – down into the depths of the dusky building toward the lighted café floor whence came the uproar of excited men, while, from the street outside, rose the frantic yelling of the mob mingled with the crash of glass and the clanging dissonance of iron grilles and shutters which were being battered into fragments.

“It’s my chance, now!” whispered Ilse Dumont, slipping past him like a shadow.

For a moment he saw her silhouetted against the yellow electric glare on the stairs below, then, half carrying the almost helpless Russian girl, he stumbled down the last flight of stairs and pushed his way through a hurrying group of men who seemed to be searching for something, for they were tearing open cupboards and buffets, dragging out table drawers and tumbling linen, crockery, and glassware all over the black and white marble floor.

The whole place was ankle deep in shattered glass and broken bottles, and the place reeked with smoke and the odour of wine and spirits.

Neeland forced his way forward into the café, looked around for Sengoun, and saw him almost immediately.

The young Russian, flushed, infuriated, his collar gone and his coat in tatters, was struggling with some men who held both his arms but did not offer to strike him.

Behind him, crowded back into a corner near the cashier’s steel-grilled desk, stood Ilse Dumont, calm, disdainful, confronted by Brandes, whose swollen, greenish eyes, injected with blood, glared redly at her. Stull had hold of him and was trying to drag him away:

“For God’s sake, Eddie, shut your mouth,” he pleaded in English. “You can’t do that to her, whatever she done to you!”

But Brandes, disengaging himself with a jerk, pushed his way past Sengoun to where Ilse stood.

“I’ve got the goods on you!” he said in a ferocious voice that neither Stull nor Curfoot recognised. “You know what you did to me, don’t you! You took my wife from me! Yes, my wife! She was my wife! She is my wife! – For all you did, you lying, treacherous slut! – For all you’ve done to break me, double-cross me, ruin me, drive me out of every place I went! And now I’ve got you! I’ve sold you out! Get that? And you know what they’ll do to you, don’t you? Well, you’ll see when–”

Curfoot and Stull threw themselves against him, but Brandes, his round face pasty with fury, struggled back again to confront Ilse Dumont.

“Ruined me!” he repeated. “Took away from me the only thing God ever gave me for my own! Took my wife!”

“You dog!” said Ilse Dumont very slowly. “You dirty dog!”

A frightful spasm crossed Brandes’ features, and Stull snatched at the pistol he had whipped out. There was a struggle; Brandes wrenched the weapon free; but Neeland tore his way past Curfoot and struck Brandes in the face with the butt of his heavy revolver.

Instantly the group parted right and left; Sengoun suddenly twisted out of the clutches of the men who held him, sprang upon Curfoot, and jerked the pistol from his fist. At the same moment the entire front of the café gave way and the mob crashed inward with a roar amid the deafening din of shattered metal and the clash of splintering glass.

Through the dust and falling shower of débris, Brandes fired at Ilse Dumont, reeled about in the whirl of the inrushing throng engulfing him, still firing blindly at the woman who had been his wife.

Neeland put a bullet into his pistol arm, and it fell. But Brandes stretched it out again with a supreme effort, pointing at Ilse Dumont with jewelled and bloody fingers:

“That woman is a German spy! A spy!” he screamed. “You damn French mutts, do you understand what I say! Oh, my God! Will someone who speaks French tell them! Will somebody tell them she’s a spy! La femme! Cette femme!” he shrieked. “Elle est espion! Esp–!” He fired again, with his left hand. Then Sengoun shot him through the head; and at the same moment somebody stabbed Curfoot in the neck; and the lank American gambler turned and cried out to Stull in a voice half strangled with pain and fury:

“Look out, Ben. There are apaches in this mob! That one in the striped jersey knifed me–”

“Tiens, v’la pour toi, sale mec de malheur!” muttered a voice at his elbow, and a blow from a slung-shot crushed the base of his skull.

As Curfoot crumpled up, Stull caught him; but the tall gambler’s dead weight bore Stull to his knees among the fierce apaches.

And there, fighting in silence to the end, his chalky face of a sick clown meeting undaunted the overwhelming odds against him, Stull was set upon by the apaches and stabbed and stabbed until his clothing was a heap of ribbons and the watch and packet of French bank-notes which the assassins tore from his body were dripping with his blood.

Sengoun and Neeland, their evening clothes in tatters, hatless, dishevelled, began shooting their way out of the hell of murder and destruction raging around them.

Behind them crept Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl: dust and smoke obscured the place where the mob raged from floor to floor in a frenzy of destruction, tearing out fixtures, telephones, window-sashes, smashing tables, bar fixtures, mirrors, ripping the curtains from the windows and the very carpets from the floor in their overwhelming rage against this German café.

That apaches had entered with them the mob cared nothing; the red lust of destruction blinded them to everything except their terrible necessity for the annihilation of this place.

If they saw murder done, and robbery – if they heard shots in the tumult and saw pistol flashes through the dust and grey light of daybreak, they never turned from their raging work.

Out of the frightful turmoil stormed Neeland and Sengoun, their pistols spitting flame, the two women clinging to their ragged sleeves. Twice the apaches barred their way with bared knives, crouching for a rush; but Sengoun fired into them and Neeland’s bullets dropped the ruffian in the striped jersey where he stood over Stull’s twitching body; and the sinister creatures leaped back from the levelled weapons, turned, and ran.

Through the gaping doorway sprang Sengoun, his empty pistol menacing the crowd that choked the shadowy street; Neeland flung away his pistol and turned his revolver on those in the café behind him, as Ilse Dumont and the Russian girl crept through and out into the street.

The crowd was cheering and shouting:

“Down with the Germans! To the Brasserie Schwarz!”

An immense wave of people surged suddenly across the rue Vilna, headed toward the German cafés on the Boulevard; and then, for the first time, Neeland caught sight of policemen standing in little groups, coolly watching the destruction of the Café des Bulgars.

Either they were too few to cope with the mob, or they were indifferent as to what was being done to a German café, but one thing was plain; the police had not the faintest idea that murder had been rampant in the place. For, when suddenly a dead body was thrown from the door out on the sidewalk, their police whistles shrilled through the street, and they started for the mob, resolutely, pushing, striking with white-gloved fists, shouting for right of way.