Working, as he cast the fragmentary sentences over his shoulder, Gavin nevertheless glanced often enough at Standish’s face to make certain from its foolishly dismayed expression that each of his conjectures was correct.  Now, finishing his task, he demanded: 

“Your servants?  Are they all right?  Can you trust them?  Your house servants, I mean.”

“Y—­yes,” stammered Milo, still battling with the idea of bluffing this calmly authoritative man.  “Yes.  They’re all right.  But where you got the idea—­”

“How many of them are there?  The servants, I mean.”

“Four,” spoke up Claire, returning from her finished work, and pausing on her way to do like duty for the upstairs windows.  “Two men and two women.”

“Please go out to the kitchen and see everything is all right, there,” said Brice.  “Lock and bar everything.  Tell your two women servants they can get out, if they want to.  They’ll be no use here and they may get hysterical, as they did last night when we had that scrimmage outside.  The men-servants may be useful.  Send them here.”

Before she could obey, the dining room curtains were parted, and a black-clad little Jap butler sidled into the hallway, his jaw adroop, his beady eyes astare with terror, his hands washing each other with invisible soap-and-water.

“Sato!” exclaimed Claire.

The Jap paid no heed.

“Prease!” he chattered between castanet teeth.  “Prease, I hear.  I scare.  I no fightman.  I go, prease!  I s-s-s-s, I—­”

Sato’s scant knowledge of English seemed to forsake him, under the stress of his terror.  And he broke into a monkeylike mouthing in his native Japanese.  Milo took a step toward him.  Sato screeched like a stuck pig and crouched to the ground.

“Wait!” suggested Brice, going toward the abject creature.  “Let me handle him.  I know a bit of his language.  Miss Standish, please go on with closing the rest of the house.  Here, you!” he continued, addressing the Jap.  “Here!”

Standing above the quivering Jap, he harangued him in halting yet vehement Japanese, gesticulating and—­after the manner of people speaking a tongue unfamiliar to them—­talking at the top of his voice.  But his oration had no stimulating effect on the poor Sato.  Scarce waiting for Brice to finish speaking, the butler broke again into that monkey-like chatter of appeal and fright.  Gavin silenced him with a threatening gesture, and renewed his own harangue.  But, after perhaps a minute of it, he saw the uselessness of trying to put manhood or pluck into the groveling little Oriental.  And he lost his own temper.

“Here!” he growled, to Standish.  “Open the front door.  Open it good and wide.  So!”

Picking up the quaking and chattering Sato by the collar, he half shoved and half flung him across the hallway, and, with a final heave, tossed him bodily down the veranda steps.  Then, closing the door, and checking Bobby Burns’s eager yearnings to charge out after his beloved deity’s victim, Brice exclaimed: