"Nothing worth mention; but _he_ must have got a pretty stiff knock, to lay him out so completely." Kirkwood stirred the body with his toe, but the man made no sign. "Dead to the world ... And now, Miss Calendar?"
If she answered, he did not hear; for on the heels of his query banged the knocker down below; and thereafter crash followed crash, brewing a deep and sullen thundering to rouse the echoes and send them rolling, like voices of enraged ghosts, through the lonely rooms.
"What's that?" At the first alarm the girl had caught convulsively at Kirkwood's arm. Now, when a pause came in the growling of the knocker, she made him hear her voice; and it was broken and vibrant with a threat of hysteria. "Oh, what can it mean?"
"I don't know." He laid a hand reassuringly over that which trembled on his forearm. "The police, possibly."
"Police!" she iterated, aghast. "What makes you think--?"
"A man tried to stop me at the door," he answered quickly. "I got in before he could. When he tried the knocker, a bobby came along and stopped him. The latter may have been watching the house since then,--it'd be only his duty to keep an eye on it; and Heaven knows we raised a racket, coming head-first down those stairs! Now we are up against it," he added brightly.
But the girl was tugging at his hand. "Come!" she begged breathlessly. "Come! There is a way! Before they break in--"
"But this man--?" Kirkwood hung back, troubled.
"They--the police are sure to find and care for him."
"So they will." He chuckled, "And serve him right! He'd have choked me to death, with all the good will in the world!"
Turning, she sped light-footed down the staircase to the lower hall, he at her elbow. Here the uproar was loudest--deep enough to drown whatever sounds might have been made by two pairs of flying feet. For all that they fled on tiptoe, stealthily, guilty shadows in the night; and at the newel-post swung back into the unbroken blackness which shrouded the fastnesses backward of the dwelling. A sudden access of fury on the part of the alarmist at the knocker, spurred them on with quaking hearts. In half a dozen strides, Kirkwood, guided only by instinct and the _frou-frou_ of the girl's skirts as she ran invisible before him, stumbled on the uppermost steps of a steep staircase; only a hand-rail saved him, and that at the last moment. He stopped short, shocked into caution. From below came a contrite whisper: "I'm so sorry! I should have warned you."