enter that room below. And those articles--

The blind man clenched his jaw and pressed the bells to call all the
men-servants in the house and Avery also. But still he got no response.

A shot in the room below meant, of course, that in addition to the
intruder there must be a defender; the defender might have been the one
who fired or the one who was killed. For it seemed likely, in the
complete silence now, that whoever had fired had disposed of his
adversary and was undisturbed. At that moment the second shot--the
first fired at Eaton--rang out below; Eaton's return fire followed
nearly simultaneously, and then the shot of the third man. These
explosions and the next three the blind man in bed above was able to
distinguish; there were three men, at least, in the room below firing
at each other; then, as the automatic revolvers roared on, he no longer
could separate attack and reply; there might be three men, there might
be half a dozen; the fusillade of the automatics overlapped; it was
incessant. Then all at once the firing stopped; there was no sound or
movement of any sort; everything seemed absolutely still below.

The blind man pressed and pressed the buttons on his bellboard. Any
further alarm, after the firing below, seemed superfluous. But his
wing of the house had been built for him proof against sound in the
main portion of the building; the house, therefore, was deadened to
noise within the wing. Santoine, accustomed to considering the manner
in which sounds came to himself, knew how these sounds would come to
others. Coming from the open windows of the wing and entering the open
windows of the other parts of the house, they would not appear to the
household to come from within the house at all; they would appear to
come from some part of the grounds or from the beach.

Yet some one or more than one from his house must be below or have been
there. Santoine pressed all the bells again and then got up. He had
heard absolutely no sound outside, as must be made by any one escaping
from the room below; but the battle seemed over. One side must have
destroyed the other. From the character of the fighting, it was most
probable that some one had secretly entered the room--Santoine thought
of that one definitely now as the man he was entertaining as Eaton; a
servant, or some one else from the house, had surprised him in the room
and was shot; other servants, roused by the alarm, rushed in and were