Gentleman Jack waited for the clamour to subside. Then he resumed his gentle drawl.
“But I’m not done,” he explained. “I’m going out now through that window. And if anybody tries to stop me, it will be his–or her–” he bowed politely to Miss Trimble–“last act in the world. If any one makes a move to stop me, I shall drop this test-tube and blow the whole damned place to pieces.”
If his first speech had made a marked impression on his audience, his second paralysed them. A silence followed as of the tomb. Only the yapping of the dog Aida refused to be stilled.
“Y’ stay where y’ are!” said Miss Trimble, as the speaker moved towards the window. She held the revolver poised, but for the first time that night–possibly for the first time in her life–she spoke irresolutely. Superbly competent woman though she was, here was a situation that baffled her.
Gentleman Jack crossed the room slowly, the test-tube held aloft between fore-finger and thumb. He was level with Miss Trimble, who had lowered her revolver and had drawn to one side, plainly at a loss to know how to handle this unprecedented crisis, when the door flew open. For an instant the face of Howard Bemis, the poet, was visible.
“Mrs. Pett, I have telephoned–”
Then another voice interrupted him.
“Yipe! Yipe! Yipe!”
Through the opening the dog Aida, rejoicing in the removal of the obstacle, raced like a fur muff mysteriously endowed with legs and a tongue. She tore across the room to where Gentleman Jack’s ankles waited invitingly. Ever since their first meeting she had wanted a fair chance at those ankles, but some one had always prevented her.
“Damn!” shouted Gentleman Jack.
The word was drowned in one vast cataclysm of noise. From every throat in the room there proceeded a shout, a shriek, or some other variety of cry, as the test-tube, slipping from between the victim’s fingers, described a parabola through the air.
Ann flung herself into Jimmy’s arms, and he held her tight. He shut his eyes. Even as he waited for the end the thought flashed through his mind that, if he must die, this was the manner of death which he would prefer.
The test-tube crashed on the writing-desk, and burst into a million pieces….
Jimmy opened his eyes. Things seemed to be much about the same as before. He was still alive. The room in which he stood was solid and intact. Nobody was in fragments. There was only one respect in which the scene differed from what it had been a moment before. Then, it had contained Gentleman Jack. Now it did not.
A great sigh seemed to sweep through the room. There was a long silence. Then, from the direction of the street, came the roar of a starting automobile. And at that sound the bearded man with the spectacles who had formed part of Miss Trimble’s procession uttered a wailing cry.
“Gee! He’s beat it in my bubble! And it was a hired one!”
The words seemed to relieve the tension in the air. One by one the company became masters of themselves once more. Miss Trimble, that masterly woman, was the first to recover. She raised herself from the floor–for with a confused idea that she would be safer there she had flung herself down–and, having dusted her skirt with a few decisive dabs of her strong left hand, addressed herself once more to business.
“I let ‘m bluff me with a fake bomb!” she commented bitterly. She brooded on this for a moment. “Say, shut th’t door ‘gain, some one, and t’run this mutt out. I can’t think with th’t yapping going on.”
Mrs. Pett, pale and scared, gathered Aida into her arms. At the same time Ann removed herself from Jimmy’s. She did not look at him. She was feeling oddly shy. Shyness had never been a failing of hers, but she would have given much now to have been elsewhere.
Miss Trimble again took charge of the situation. The sound of the automobile had died away. Gentleman Jack had passed out of their lives. This fact embittered Miss Trimble. She spoke with asperity.