“I’m not.”

“Is that final?”

“It is.”

“All right.  Tie him up, boys.  There ain’t no other way!”

“Look out!” shouted a score of voices, for a gun flashed in Dan’s hand.

He aimed at no human target.  The bullet shattered the glass lamp into a thousand shivering and tinkling splinters.  Thick darkness blotted the room.  Instantly thereafter a blow, a groan, and the fall of a body; then a confused clamour.

“He’s here!”

“Give up that gun, damn you!”

“You got the wrong man!”

“I’m Bill Flynn!”

“Guard the door!”

“Lights, for God’s sake!”

“Help!”

A slender figure leaped up against the window and was dimly outlined by the starlight outside.  There was a crash of falling glass, and as two or three guns exploded the figure leaped down outside the house.

“Follow him!”

“Who was that?”

“Get a light!  Who’s got a match?”

Half the men rushed out of the room to pursue that fleeing figure.  The other half remained to see what had happened.  It seemed impossible that Whistling Dan had escaped from their midst.  Half a dozen sulphur matches spurted little jets of blue flame and discovered four men lying prone on the floor, most of them with the wind trampled from their bodies, but otherwise unhurt.  One of them was the sheriff.

He lay with his shoulders propped against the wall.  His mouth was a mass of blood.

“Who got you, Rogers?”

“Where’s Barry?”

“The jail, the jail!” groaned Rogers.  “Barry has gone for the jail!”

Revolvers rattled outside.

“He’s gone for Haines,” screamed the deputy.  “Go get him, boys!”

“How can he get Haines?  He ain’t got the keys.”

“He has, you fools!  When he shot the lights out he jumped for me and knocked me off the chair.  Then he went through my pockets and got the keys.  Get on your way!  Quick!”

The lynchers, yelling with rage, were already stamping from the room.

With the jangling bunch of keys in one hand and his revolver in the other, Dan started full speed for the jail as soon as he leaped down from the window.  By the time he had covered half the intervening distance the first pursuers burst out of Rogers’s house and opened fire after the shadowy fugitive.  He whirled and fired three shots high in the air.  No matter how impetuous, those warning shots would make the mob approach the jail with some caution.

On the door of the jail he beat furiously with the bunch of keys.

“What’s up?  Who’s there?” cried a voice within.

“Message from Rogers.  Hell’s started!  He’s sent me with the keys!”

The door jerked open and a tall man, with a rifle slung across one arm, blocked the entrance.

“What’s the message?” he asked.

“This!” said Dan, and drove his fist squarely into the other’s face.