ou must wait here and explain yes, and show your papers. You cannot
walk away like this!"

His companions pressed nearer interestedly. Waters could not know the
figure he cut, with his torn blouse which even in the gloom showed
stains of the mud and blood of the combat.

"Get out of my way!" was all his answer.

"Your papers," persisted the stout man. "I," he puffed his chest, "I
am in the Administration; I require to see your papers. Produce
them!"

The pale oblong of his fat face wagged at Waters peremptorily; he
quite obviously felt himself a spokesman for order and decency and
the divinely ordained institution of "papers."

"I said get out o' my way," said Waters clearly. He put the flat of
his hand against the stout man's fur-coated chest, shoved, and sent
him staggering back on his heels among his supporters. Without
looking towards him again, he passed through them and continued his
way. He heard the chorus of their indignation break out behind him.

It followed him, a cackle of outraged respectability, with here and
there an epithet distinguishable like a plum in a pudding. "Ruffian,"
they called him, "assassin," "robber," and so forth, the innocuous
amateur abuse of men who have learned their bad language from their
newspapers. It was not till he had gone a hundred yards, and the
noise of their lamentation had a little died down, that there emerged
out of the blur of it a voice that was quite clear.

"Hi, you there!" It rang with the note of practiced authority. "Halt,
d'you hear? Halt!"

The tones were enough, without the fashion of the words, to tell him
that a policeman had arrived on the scene. He looked back and saw
that the group of citizens was flowing along the sidewalk towards
him, a black moving blot. He could not distinguish the policeman, but
he knew that the others must be escorting him, coming with him to see
the finish.

There was a corner some thirty or forty yards farther on. Waters
jammed his cap tighter on his head, picked up his heels and sprinted
for it.

"Halt, there!" shouted the policeman. "Halt-I'll shoot!"

Waters was at the corner when the shot sounded, detonating, like a
cannon in the channel of the street. Where the bullet went he did not
guess; he was round the corner, running in the middle of the street
for the next turning, with eyes alert for any entrance in which he
might find a refuge. But the firing had had its intended effect of
bringing every dvornik to his g