the gangsters, who were expected to do the talking.

Bert Rhine lurched angrily toward the sound of the Jew's voice. Chantz's
partisans drew closer to him.

"Jail you," I answered from above. "And it shall go as hard with all of
you as I can make it hard."

"Maybe you will an' maybe you won't," the Jew retorted.

"Shut up, Chantz!" Bert Rhine commanded.

"And you'll get yours, you wop," Chantz snarled, "if I have to do it
myself."

I am afraid that I am not so successfully the man of action that I have
been priding myself on being; for, so curious and interested was I in
observing the moving drama beneath me that for the moment I failed to
glimpse the tragedy into which it was culminating.

"Bombini!" Bert Rhine said.

His voice was imperative. It was the order of a master to the dog at
heel. Bombini responded. He drew his knife and started to advance upon
the Jew. But a deep rumbling, animal-like in its _sound_ and menace,
arose in the throats of those about the Jew.

Bombini hesitated and glanced back across his shoulder at the leader,
whose face he could not see for bandages and who he knew could not see.

"'Tis a good deed--do it, Bombini," Charles Davis encouraged.

"Shut your face, Davis!" came out from Bert Rhine's bandages.

Kid Twist drew a revolver, shoved the muzzle of it first into Bombini's
side, then covered the men about the Jew.

Really, I felt a momentary twinge of pity for the Italian. He was caught
between the mill-stones, "Bombini, stick that Jew," Bert Rhine commanded.

The Italian advanced a step, and, shoulder to shoulder, on either side,
Kid Twist and Nosey Murphy advanced with him.

"I cannot see him," Bert Rhine went on; "but by God I will see him!"

And so speaking, with one single, virile movement he tore away the
bandages. The toll of pain he must have paid is beyond measurement. I
saw the horror of his face, but the description of it is beyond the
limits of any English I possess. I was aware that Margaret, at my
shoulder, gasped and shuddered.

"Bombini!--stick him," the gangster repeated. "And stick any man that
raises a yap. Murphy! See that Bombini does his work."

Murphy's knife was out and at the bravo's back. Kid Twist covered the
Jew's group with his revolver. And the three advanced.

It was at this moment that I suddenly recollected myself and passed from
dream to action.

"Bombini!" I said sharply.

He paused and looked up.

"Stand where y