ght of
his body along the cornice ledge, still pawing and feeling, feverishly
and ridiculously, with his gyrating limbs. Then a joy of relief swept
through him. The ladder was there, and his feet were already on its
second step.

As he ran, cat-like, across the lower apartment-house roof, he knew
that he stood in full range of his pursuers above, and he knew that by
this time they were already crowding out to the cornice-ledge. There
was no time for thought. He did not pause to look back at them, to
weigh either the problem or the possible consequences in his mind; he
only remembered that that afternoon he had noticed five crowded lines
of washing swinging in multi-colored disarray at the back of that
many-familied hive of life. He hesitated only once, at the sheer edge
of the roof, to make sure, in the uncertain half-light, that he was
above those crowded lines.

"Let him have it--there he goes!" cried a voice above, and at that too
warning note his hesitation took wing.

Durkin leaped out into space, straddling the first line of sodden
clothes as he fell. Even in that brief flight the thought came to his
mind that it would have been infinitely better for him if the falling
rain had not weighted and flattened those sagging lines of washing.
Then he remembered, more gratefully, that it was probably only because
of the rain that they still swung there.

As his weight came on the first line it snapped under the blow, as did
the second, which he clutched with his hands, and the third, which he
doubled over, limply, and the fourth, which cut up under his arm-pit.
But as he went downward he carried that ever-growing avalanche of
cotton and woolen and linen with him, so that when his sprawling figure
smote the stone court it fell muffled and hidden in a web of tangled
garments.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STRAITS OF CHANCE

How his flight ended Durkin never clearly remembered. He had a dim and
uneasy memory of the lapse of time, either great or little, the
confused recollection of waking to his senses and fighting his way free
from a smothering weight of wet and clinging clothes. As he struggled
to his feet a stab of pain shot through his left hand, and up through
his forearm. It was so keen and penetrating that he surmised, in his
blank and unreasoning haste, that he must have torn a chord or broken a
bone in his wrist. But on a matter like that, he felt, he could now
waste no time.

If he had, indeed, be