ate, and there was nothing for it but
to run on. He heard the chase round the corner behind him and the
policeman's 'repeated shout; the skin of his back crawled in
momentary expectation of another shot that might not go wild; and
then, with the next corner yet twenty yards away, came the idea.

The mere felicity of it tickled him like a jest in the midst of all
his stress; he spent hoarded breath in a gasp of laughter.

Around the corner that lay just ahead of him, for which he was
racing, was the street in which Miss Pilgrim lived, with her outer
room that was always ready and waiting. Without design or purpose he
had run towards it; an inscrutable fate, whimsical as his own humor,
had herded him thither. Well, he would go there! The matter was
slight, after all; she would explain the whole matter to her Chief of
Police, how the istvostchik had been the assailant and so forth; he
would be released, and her self-appointed function of "vice-vice"
would shine forth justified and vindicated. It all fell out as
dexterously as a conjuring trick.

"Halt!" yelled the policeman. "I know you, halt!"

But he did not shoot again; those southern policemen lack the fiber
that will loose bullet after bullet along a dark street; and Waters
had yet a good lead as he rounded the next corner and came into
cover. The house he sought was near by; as he cleared the angle, he
dropped into a swift walk that the new row of dvorniks might not mark
him at once for a fugitive, and strode along sharply under the wall
where it was darkest. He passed Number Seventeen without a sign from
its dvornik, and in the gate of Number Fifteen two dvorniks were
gossiping and did not turn their heads as he passed. The arch of
Number Thirteen, the house he sought, was close at hand when the
pursuit came stamping round the corner behind him; he heard their
cries as he slipped in through the half-open gate of the arch. The
chance that had brought him hither was true to him yet, for there was
no dvornik on watch; the man had chosen that moment of all others to
step over to gossip with his neighbor of Number Fifteen.

He paused in the blackness of the courtyard to listen whether the
pursuit would pass by, and heard it arrive outside the gate, jangling
with voices. It had gathered up the dvornik on its way. Waters, with
a hand upon the door that opened to the staircase, heard the brisk
voice of the policeman questioning him in curt spurts of speech, and
the dv