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246 of passing checked speed until its pace was even with his own.

Struck by the strangeness of this manoeuvre, he looked quickly round, to recognize the moon-like mask of De Morbihan grinning sardonically at him over the steering-wheel of the black car.

A second hasty glance discovered four men in the tonneau. Lacking time to identify them, Lanyard questioned their character as little as their malign intent: Belleville bullies, beyond doubt, drafted from Popinot's batallions, with orders to bring in the Lone Wolf, dead or alive.

He had instant proof that his apprehensions were not exaggerated. Of a sudden De Morbihan cut out the muffler and turned loose, full strength, the electric horn. Between the harsh detonations of the exhaust and the mad, blatant shrieks of the warning, a hideous clamour echoed and reëchoed in that quiet street—a din in which the report of a revolver-shot was drowned out and went unnoticed. Lanyard himself might have been unaware of it, had he not caught out of the corner of his eye a flash that spat out at him like a fiery serpent's tongue, and heard the crash of the window behind him as it fell inward, shattered.

That the shot had no immediate successor was due almost wholly to Lanyard's instant and instinctive action.

Even before the clash of broken glass registered on his consciousness, he threw in the high-speed and shot away like a frightened greyhound.

So sudden was this move that it caught De Morbihan himself unprepared. In an instant Lanyard had ten yards' lead. In another he was spinning on two wheels round an