each other, all opening
into the bar-room. On the benches six girls were lolling about, dressed
in gaudy tights, and with them were three or four men. The room was hot
to suffocation, and the smell from the dim and dirty lamps that stood on
each end of the bar, together with the foul tobacco-smoke with which the
atmosphere was saturated, combined to make the place disgusting and
poisonous.

All these conditions Mr. Dootleby took in at his first glance, and his
second fell upon two figures in the center of the room, from whom had
proceded the noises he had heard. One was that of a girl cowering on her
knees and moaning in a voice from which reason had clearly departed. A
big, unconscionably brutal-looking man stood over her, holding her down
by her hair, which, braided in a single plait, was wound about his hand.
He had just thrown the stick upon the floor with which he had been
beating her, and was drawing from the stove a red-hot poker.

[Illustration: THE FELLOW WHEELED QUICKLY AROUND.]

Mr. Dootleby was not of an excitable temperament ordinarily, but his
senses were so affected by the horrors he saw and the pestilential air
he breathed that his head began to swim, and only by an especial draft
upon his resolution was he able to command himself. There was a pause
consequent upon his entrance, and his quick eyes made good use of it.

He saw that the girl had already been half murdered, and that her
assailant was a short, thick-set old man, with the eyes of a snake and
the neck of a bull. He saw that the men on the bench, all beastly
specimens, were contemplating her torture with an indifference that
would have shamed the grossest savage. Several of the women, too--the
older ones--were looking on with scarcely the sign of a protest in their
faces, and only one, a mere child, seemed to feel a genuine sense of
terror and sympathy.

Mr. Dootleby threw open his coat, tightened his grasp on his
walking-stick, and said, very quietly: "What are you doing?"

The fellow wheeled quickly around. He looked with intense malice at Mr.
Dootleby, and then shouted at one of the women, "Why didencher lock de
door like I toljer, you fool?"

Mr. Dootleby did not wait for either of these questions to be answered.
He sprang into action with all the agility and ferocity of a young
panther. The handle of his cane was a huge knob of carved ivory. He
brought it directly on the head of the ruffian in a blow of tremendous
force, and as the