His intervention gave a few seconds’ respite, one of those checks that save battles and make history.  Now, in the further making of this particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction; such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives.  It emanated from Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope, followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still perspiring from their afternoon’s cricket.  Against bare legs a cricket bat is a highly dissuasive argument.  The Britons swung low and hard for the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men are in the minority against other races.  The downhill wing of the mob being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance, leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.

“Wot’s the merry game?” inquired the cockney cheerfully.

Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running from a great gash in the scalp.

“He went down in front of my horse,” explained the Hochwald secretary coolly.

At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different from its former voice.  Galpy’s teeth set and his cricket bat went up in the air.

“There’ll be killing for this,” he said.  “I know these blightehs.  That yell means blood.  We must make a bolt for it.  Is this all there is of us?”

At the moment of his asking, it was.  One half a second later, it wasn’t, as the last of the legation’s stubborn bars yielded, the door burst open, and the four Americans tumbled out at the charge, Cluff yelling insanely, Carroll in deadly quiet, Sherwen alertly scanning the adversaries for identifiable faces, and Elder Brewster still imperiling his soul by the fervor of his language.  Each was armed with such casual weapons as he had been able to catch up.  Carroll, a leap in advance of the rest, encountered an Indian drover, half-dodged a swinging blow from his whip, and sent him down with a broken shoulder from a chop with a baseball club that he had found in the hallway.  A bull-like charge had carried Cluff deep among the Caracunans, where he encountered a huge peon. whom he seized and flung bodily over the iron guard of a samon tree, where the man hung, yelling dismally.  Two other peons, who had seized the athlete around the knees, were all but brained by a stoneware gin bottle in the hands of Sherwen.  Meanwhile, Mr. Brewster was performing prodigies with a niblick which he had extracted, at full run, from a bag opportunely resting against the hat-rack.  Almost before they knew it, the rescue party had broken the intercepting wing of the mob, and had joined the others.

Cluff threw a gorilla-like arm across the Unspeakable Perk’s shoulder,

“Hurt, boy?” he cried anxiously.