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256 the automatic revolvers roared on, he no longer could separate attack and reply; there might be three men, there might be half a dozen; the fusillade of the automatics overlapped; it was incessant. Then all at once the firing stopped; there was no sound or movement of any sort; everything seemed absolutely still below.

The blind man pressed and pressed the buttons on his bellboard. Any further alarm, after the firing below, seemed superfluous. But his wing of the house had been built for him proof against sound in the main portion of the building; the house, therefore, was deadened to noise within the wing. Santoine, accustomed to considering the manner in which sounds came to himself, knew how these sounds would come to others. Coming from the open windows of the wing and entering the open windows of the other parts of the house, they would not appear to the household to come from within the house at all; they would appear to come from some part of the grounds or from the beach.

Yet some one or more than one from his house must be below or have been there. Santoine pressed all the bells again and then got up. He had heard absolutely no sound outside, as must be made by any one escaping from the room below; but the battle seemed over. One side must have destroyed the other. From the character of the fighting, it was most probable that some one had secretly entered the room—Santoine thought of that one definitely now as the man he was entertaining as Eaton; a servant, or some one else from the house, had surprised him in the room and was shot; other servants, roused by the alarm, rushed in and were shot. Santoine counted that, if his servants had survived, one of them must be coming to tell him what had happened.