The frosted-glass door opened.  The driver came back.  He had a revolver in his hand.

“Too bad!” he said calmly.  “We should’ve been more careful.  But the lady saw too much.  Now—­”

The revolver bore on Lockley.  Jill flung herself upon it.  Lockley swung, with every ounce of his strength.  He connected with the driver’s jaw.  The driver went limp.  Lockley had the revolver almost before he reached the floor.

“Quick!” he snapped.  “Where was the machinery?  Front or back part of the trailer?”

“All of it,” panted Jill.  “Mostly front.  What—­”

“The hall again,” Lockley snapped.  “Hunt for a back door!”

He thrust her out.  She fumbled toward the back of the building while he went to the street entrance.  The trailer-truck loomed huge.  The driver’s helper came out of it.  Another man followed him.  Still another....

Lockley fired from the doorway.  One bullet through the front part of the truck.  One near the middle.  Then a third halfway between the first two.  The three men dived to the ground, thinking themselves his targets.  But Jill called inarticulately from the back of the dark hall.  Lockley raced back to her.  He saw starlight.  She waited, shivering.  They went out and he closed the door softly behind him.

He took her hand and they ran through the night.  Overhead there was a luminous mistiness because of the street light, but here were abysmal darknesses between vague areas on which the starlight fell.  Lockley said evenly, “We’ve got to be quiet.  Maybe I hit some of the machinery.  Maybe.  If I didn’t, it’s all over!”

The back of a building.  An alleyway.  They ran down it.  There was a street with trees, where the street lights cast utterly black shadows in between intolerable glare.  They ran across the street.  On the other side were residences—­the business district was not large.  Lockley found a gate, and opened it quietly and as quietly closed it behind them.  They ran into a lane between two dead, dark, dreary structures in which people had lived but from which all life was now gone.

A back yard.  A fence.  Lockley helped Jill get over it.  Another lane.  Another street.  But this street was not crossed—­not here, anyhow—­by another which led back to the street of the telephone office.  A man could not look from there and see them running under the lights.

The blessed irregularity of the streets continued.  They ran and ran until Jill’s breath came in pantings.  Lockley was drenched in sweat because he expected at any instant to smell the most loathesome of all possible combinations of odors, and then to see flashing lights originating in his own eyes, and sounds which would exist only in the nerves of his ears, and then to feel all his muscles knot in total and horrible paralysis.

They heard the truck motor rumble into life when they were many blocks away.  They heard the clumsy vehicle move.  It continued to growl, and they knew that it was moving about the streets with its occupants trying to sight fleeing figures under the darknesses which were trees.