was, it could be found. In the
meantime, his manoeuver had given him what he wanted--more space in
which to fight two men. With a sudden movement Shaw picked up the
silver-framed photograph, and ostentatiously blew the dust off it. This
done, he held it out and looked at it admiringly.

"You will stay here, but you will not be alone," he promised, with his
wide, sharp-toothed grin. "This will keep you company. See how the
charming lady smiles at the prospect--"

He dropped the picture, which fell with a crash on the tiled flooring
around the fireplace. The glass broke and splintered. Shaw gasped and
gurgled under the strangling hold of the powerful fingers on his throat.
Lamp and table were overturned in the struggle that carried the three
men half a dozen times across the room and back.

Laurie, fighting two opponents with desperate fury, could still see
their forms and Shaw's bulging eyes in the firelight. Then he himself
gasped and choked. Something wet and sweet was pressed against his face.
He heard an excited whisper:

"Hold on! Be careful there. Not too much of that!"

A moment more and he had slipped over the edge of the world and was
dropping through black space.

CHAPTER XI

A BIT OF BRIGHT RIBBON

When Laurie opened his eyes blackness was still around him, a blackness
without a point of light. But as his mind slowly cleared, the picture he
saw in his last conscious moment flashed across his mental vision--the
dim, firelit room, the struggling, straining figures of Shaw and the
blond secretary. He heard again the hissed caution, "Not too much of
that!"

He sat up, dizzily. There _had_ been "too much of that." He felt faint
and mildly nauseated. His hands, groping in the darkness, came in
contact with a brick floor; or was it the tiling around the fireplace?
He did not know. He decided to sit quite still for a moment, until he
could pull himself together.

His body felt stiff and sore. There must have been a dandy fight in that
dingy old room, he reflected with satisfaction. Perhaps the other two
men were lying somewhere near him in the darkness. Perhaps they, too,
were knocked out. He hoped they were. But no, of course not. Again he
remembered the hurried caution, "Not too much of that."

He decided to light a match and see where he was, and he fumbled in his
pockets with the first instinct of panic he had known. If those brutes
had taken his match-box! But they hadn't. He opened it care