ion came more quickly than he had expected.
And it came grimly, and in a manner most unlooked for.

For even as the reluctant Keenan stooped over the heavy table, not ten
feet from the shaft, the elevator cage descended. It flashed by the
open door without stopping on its hurried course. But as it winged
past that square of open light a revolver shot rang out and reechoed
through the room.

Durkin, peering across the curling smoke, saw Keenan pitch forward on
his hands, struggle and thrash to his feet once more, like a wounded
rabbit. Then he fell again, prone on his face, close beside the shaft
door. There he lay, breathing in little gurgles.

Durkin, with little beads of sweat on his pallid face, realized what it
meant. That flying shot had been intended for _him_. MacNutt, in that
desperate and hurried and unreasoning last chance, had delivered his
blow, but had been mistaken in his man!

This knowledge flashed through his mind with the rapidity of a
kinetoscope plate, and a moment later was obliterated by still another
hurrying impression. For, through the deserted house rang two short
and terrified screams, high-pitched and piercing. They were a woman's
screams, and he knew they could come from no one but Frank.

He turned and hurled himself down the stairway, without even waiting to
recover the revolver that had fallen a minute before from his startled
fingers. He was conscious only of flinging the weight of his sliding
body on the flume-like surface of the smooth balustrade, with his feet
clattering on the polished steps as he went. He turned and dashed on
to the head of the next stairway, and in the same manner flung himself
to the floor beneath, and then to the next, and the next, until he was
in the gloom of the basement itself.

Breathless and panting, he groped his way through the darkness, to
where a glimmer of light came from what he hurriedly took to be the
engine-room.

There, as he darted through the narrow doorway, into the circle of dim
light from the one tinted globe in the lowered elevator cage, a strange
sight met his eyes. It shocked and flung him into a second or two of
blank indecision, of volitionless and thoughtless inactivity. For one
moment of ominous calm it smote and held him there, before the sudden
blind, cyclonic rush of brain and body which the vision gave rise to.

For at the door of the open cage MacNutt and Frank fought and struggled
and panted together. The ma