han he gave from a dozen
fists and feet. Strong as a bull, always in training, his strength was
beaten and kicked from him in twenty seconds, and with Bruce and the
driver--who, bravely enough, if reluctantly, had leaped to his
assistance--things were no better.

A whistling, shrill and metallic, brought the fight to a sudden end. The
crowd drew back sullen and reluctant, no longer shouting and cursing,
but muttering, explaining, and discreet.

Barbara took from her lips the whistle which Kid Shannon had given her.
She was very white, but her eyes blazed with the light of success and
power. The bringing of the whistle had been an accident, the blowing it
an act of desperation: but perceiving the sudden effect of that blowing
she could not but feel that she had done something strategically good
and in the nick of time. Savage began to straighten his collar and
necktie, Bruce to nurse a sprained thumb. The second cab came up. Ely
the and Morton Haddon got out and, full of perplexity but not unamused,
fell to asking questions of their dishevelled friends. These, winded
and bruised, could give but an ejaculatory explanation, mostly of what
they would do to such and such a one if they could isolate him from his
fellow cutthroats for five minutes; and Blythe and Haddon, not bruised
and winded, told them to pull themselves together. Meanwhile the crowd
had disintegrated before the possible arrival of Kid Shannon; had
vanished like a lump of sugar in a cup of tea. Even the little child who
had been the cause of the uproar had disappeared. So a colony of
prairie-dogs vanishes into its burrows at the shadow of a hawk.

The short street was deserted save for the figure of a rapidly
approaching policeman. Why this guardian of the peace had not been upon
his beat during the fracas could have been best explained perhaps by the
proprietor of a disorderly house, from whom at the time he had been
levying a weekly stipend of lust money and a glass of beer. For his
lapse of duty, however, he made such amends as were possible. In short,
he took the numbers of both taxicabs, the names of their occupants, and
told them, with stern condescension, that they were now at liberty to
pursue their interrupted way.

But first Barbara received praise for having blown the whistle, and
Bruce and Savage were made to say repeatedly that they insisted on going
on with the evening's entertainment; that they were not really hurt, and
that they wouldn't