up the stairs.

Noise awoke and rioted down the thoroughfare. Men rushed forth
from every quarter, and the ghastly object in the dirt was hidden
by a seething mass of miners.

Glenister raised the girl, but her head rolled limply, and she
would have slipped to her knees again had he not placed his arm
about her waist. Her eyes were staring and horror-filled.

"Don't be frightened," said he, smiling at her reassuringly; but
his own lips shook and the sweat stood out like dew on him; for
they had both been close to death. There came a surge and swirl
through the crowd, and Dextry swooped upon them like a hawk.

"Be ye hurt? Holy Mackinaw! When I see 'em blaze away I yells at
ye fit to bust my throat. I shore thought you was gone. Although I
can't say but this killin' was a sight for sore eyes--so neat an'
genteel--still, as a rule, in these street brawls it's the
innocuous bystander that has flowers sent around to his house
afterwards."

"Look at this," said Glenister. Breast-high in the wall against
which they had crouched, not three feet apart, were bullet holes.

"Them's the first two he unhitched," Dextry remarked, jerking his
head towards the object in the street. "Must have been a new gun
an' pulled hard--throwed him to the right. See!"

Even to the girl it was patent that, had she not been snatched as