“The mob’s coming back!” he called to me.  “We’ve got to get out of this!”

We fled, hand in hand, down the bloody pavement, slipping and sliding, and making for the corner.  Down the cross street we could see a few soldiers still running.  Nothing was happening to them.  The way was clear.  So we paused a moment and looked back.  The mob came on slowly.  It was busy arming itself with the rifles of the slain and killing the wounded.  We saw the end of the young officer who had rescued us.  He painfully lifted himself on his elbow and turned loose with his automatic pistol.

“There goes my chance of promotion,” Garthwaite laughed, as a woman bore down on the wounded man, brandishing a butcher’s cleaver.  “Come on.  It’s the wrong direction, but we’ll get out somehow.”

And we fled eastward through the quiet streets, prepared at every cross street for anything to happen.  To the south a monster conflagration was filling the sky, and we knew that the great ghetto was burning.  At last I sank down on the sidewalk.  I was exhausted and could go no farther.  I was bruised and sore and aching in every limb; yet I could not escape smiling at Garthwaite, who was rolling a cigarette and saying: 

“I know I’m making a mess of rescuing you, but I can’t get head nor tail of the situation.  It’s all a mess.  Every time we try to break out, something happens and we’re turned back.  We’re only a couple of blocks now from where I got you out of that entrance.  Friend and foe are all mixed up.  It’s chaos.  You can’t tell who is in those darned buildings.  Try to find out, and you get a bomb on your head.  Try to go peaceably on your way, and you run into a mob and are killed by machine-guns, or you run into the Mercenaries and are killed by your own comrades from a roof.  And on the top of it all the mob comes along and kills you, too.”

He shook his head dolefully, lighted his cigarette, and sat down beside me.

“And I’m that hungry,” he added, “I could eat cobblestones.”

The next moment he was on his feet again and out in the street prying up a cobblestone.  He came back with it and assaulted the window of a store behind us.

“It’s ground floor and no good,” he explained as he helped me through the hole he had made; “but it’s the best we can do.  You get a nap and I’ll reconnoitre.  I’ll finish this rescue all right, but I want time, time, lots of it—­and something to eat.”

It was a harness store we found ourselves in, and he fixed me up a couch of horse blankets in the private office well to the rear.  To add to my wretchedness a splitting headache was coming on, and I was only too glad to close my eyes and try to sleep.

“I’ll be back,” were his parting words.  “I don’t hope to get an auto, but I’ll surely bring some grub,* anyway.”

     * Food.

And that was the last I saw of Garthwaite for three years.  Instead of coming back, he was carried away to a hospital with a bullet through his lungs and another through the fleshy part of his neck.