Their shots passed clear through the flimsy partitions, and there was a horrid screeching, like a beast's howls, from within.

The front door was thrown open, and a lean, fierce-eyed girl, with a case-knife in her hand, ran out in the face of the mob.

At sound of the shots in the rear they had begun to advance on the house a second time, and Hartley Bowlder was the nearest man to the girl.

With awful words, and shrieking inconceivably, she made straight at Hartley, and attacked him with the knife.

She struck at him again and again, and, in her anguish of hate and fear, was so extraordinary a spectacle that she gained for her companions the four or five seconds they needed to escape from the house.