faint, but distinct, two quick taps, a pause, and a third,
then all repeated. "Tap, tap--tap; tap, tap--tap."

The evidence of confederates, the quick response to the appeal of
their comrade, the taps that came from everywhere and nowhere,
manifestation of the desperate men surrounding him, might well have
daunted the soul of any man. Three sentences had been pronounced that
day, a term of years upon Jerry McGuire and Barry O'Toole, but death
upon James McDill. You may depend upon it that the doctor was none the
more reassured when on the morrow he learned that McGuire and O'Toole
had escaped. With their anger and resentment yet hot within them,
these men would doubtless at once set about to encompass his
destruction, and he knew that when once one of these societies had
decreed the death of a person who balked or incensed them, every
endeavor was used to put the decree into effect. But, after a little,
he took courage from the very fact that was most threatening. If these
men, these desperate and despicable scoundrels, could escape from the
barriers of stone and steel and the guardians that surrounded them,
why might not he fight for his life and win in the struggle which both
reason and instinct told him was inevitable?

That those he loved most might not be involved in the perils he felt
certain he was about to encounter and that his resolution and his
movements might not be hampered by their presence and their fears, he
found means to persuade his wife to take the children for a visit to
their grandfather, and setting his affairs in order and providing
himself with two revolvers, a bowie knife, and an Italian stiletto, he
even began to look forward to the approaching struggle with something
of that pleasure which man experiences in the anticipation of any
contest; and there is indeed a certain keen zest in playing the game
where one's stake is one's life.

On the evening of the day of his wife's departure, he was called to
assist in an operation at a hospital with which he had once been
connected, and unexpected complications arising, it was not until two
in the morning that he started away. His man and carriage, that he had
ordered to await him, had gone. The night was mild and it must have
been weariness or restiveness, that had caused the departure. Although
some distance lay between the hospital and his home, he started afoot.
Not a soul was to been seen in the street, which, thanks to the light
of the moon