Page:Barbour--For the freedom from the seas.djvu/66

 searched for the rungs with impatient feet. From below came a dim yellow radiance. He heard the sharp report of a revolver, voices, the thud of Staples' body as he spurned the last rungs of the ladder. He looked down. Jones was flattened against the wall, but he cried a warning and dropped.

He landed on his feet, collided with Jones and sprawled sideways. Another shot rang out and he was conscious of a blow on his arm under the shoulder and of Jones leaping across him. Then he struggled to his feet. Smoke wreathed and eddied in the dim light of a single lamp that hung from a nail in one corner, and made a haze through which he saw dimly. One of the enemy lay prone on the earth floor with blood trickling from bis head. A second, a smoking pistol still in his grasp, stood with his hands above him. A third, surprised at the instrument, the receiver still in place was slewed half-way around on the box that served for chair and with drooping jaw and frightened eyes raised his hands, too, in token of surrender while his furtive glances swept the room for an avenue of escape. But the fourth and last member of the quartet was still unsubdued. It was he who had fired the last shot, and, although his revolver now lay on the ground 44