heir ears
twitching for the expected blast of denial and denunciation which would
wither these mad and scandalous detractors in their tracks.

Alas and alackaday! With his splendid figure suddenly all diminished and
shrunken, with distress writ large and plain upon his features, the
popular idol was step by step flinching backward from the edge of the
platform--was step by step inching, edging toward the side door in the
right-hand wall.

And in this same instant the stunned assemblage realized that Jeff
Poindexter, by nimble maneuvering, had thrust himself between the
retreating figure and the exit, and Jeff was crying out: "Not dis way
out, Doct' Duvall. Not dis way! The one you married down below Macon is
waitin' fur you behin' dis do'!"

The doctor stopped in midflight and swung about and his eye fell upon
the right-hand door and he moved a yard or two in that direction; but no
more than a yard or two, for again Jeff spoke in warning, halting him
short:

"Not dat way neither! The one frum dat other town whar you uster live is
waitin' outside dat do'--wid a pistil! Seems lak you's entirely
s'rounded by wives dis evenin'!"

To the verge of the footlights the beset man darted, and like a
desperate swimmer plunging from a foundering bark into a stormy sea he
leaped far out and projected himself, a living catapult, along the
middle aisle. He struck the tall yellow woman as the irresistible force
strikes the supposedly immovable object of the scientists' age-old
riddle, but on his side was impetus and on hers surprise. She was bowled
over flat and her hands, clutching as she went down, closed, but on
empty and unresisting air. Literally he hurdled over the stocky form of
the little black man behind her, but as the other flitted by him the
fists of the stranger knotted firmly into the skirts of its wearer's
long black frock coat and held on. There was a rending, tearing sound
and as the back breadth of the garment ripped bodily away from the
waistband there flew forth from the capsized tail pockets a veritable
cloudburst of currency--floating, fluttering green and yellow bills and
with them pattering showers of dollars and halves and dimes and quarters
and nickels.

That canny instinct which had led the fugitive apostle of the uplift to
hide the collected funds of the league upon his person rather than trust
to banks and strong boxes was to prove his ruination financially but his
salvation physically. While those w