"No shooting here, Marx," cried the elder man earnestly. "It isn’t safe."
"Why didn’t you say that when he was covering us?" was the angrily spoken reply. "He shall pay for Gassen’s death."
But terror of the consequences made the man earnest, and for a second he stood right in the way of the pointed weapons. They pushed him hurriedly aside; but I had been able to use the moment. I clapped my hand to my pocket feeling for the weapon I had annexed, but instead I felt the bomb I had taken from the old Baron, and raised it high so that all should see it just as the man was thrust to one side.
"I’ll send him to hell for that," declared the more daring man.
"Then we’ll all go there together," I cried in a ringing voice. "I can do it with this."
One of them fired at once, and that I was not killed was due only to the "general’s" terror. He threw up the fellow’s arm as he fired.
"For God’s sake," he exclaimed. "Are you all mad?"
"You fool," was the reply. "The thing’s only a sham."
Again he was being pushed aside when another man came rushing in.
"The police!" he cried. And at the same instant we heard a loud peremptory knocking at one of the street doors below.
In a moment panic held every man in the room in its thrall. Dead silence fell on us.
But I doubt if any one of them was more utterly confounded than I or more desperately embarrassed. To fall into the hands of the police was better than to be shot down like a dog; but it meant a hundred hazards for me to be caught under such circumstances.
We all stood staring at one another like a set of wax figures, the common peril knitting us together in a bond of panic.
Then the knocking was repeated with even louder clamour than before.
The second clamour of the police at the doors below brought me to my senses; and luckily I was the first man to throw off the apathy of alarm which their coming had caused.
If any of us were to escape, it could only be by the river; and I set about making a desperate attempt to get away by that means and to take the Baron with me.
As I had had to carry my life in my hands when coming into the building, and had been fully alive to the fact that my safety might depend upon my knowing how to get out of it again without even a second’s hesitation, I had observed with scrupulous care the means of exit.