In the excitement and tumult it is doubtful if any heard the three quickly repeated blows that fell heavily from the outside upon the big doors of the barn.  If they did, it was already too late to mend matters, for the door fell, torn from its hinges, and as it fell a captain of police sprang into the light from out of the storm, with his lieutenants and their men crowding close at his shoulder.

In the panic and stampede that followed, several of the men stood as helplessly immovable as though they had seen a ghost; others made a mad rush into the arms of the officers and were beaten back against the ropes of the ring; others dived headlong into the stalls, among the horses and cattle, and still others shoved the rolls of money they held into the hands of the police and begged like children to be allowed to escape.

The instant the door fell and the raid was declared Hefflefinger slipped over the cross rails on which he had been lying, hung for an instant by his hands, and then dropped into the centre of the fighting mob on the floor.  He was out of it in an instant with the agility of a pickpocket, was across the room and at Hade’s throat like a dog.  The murderer, for the moment, was the calmer man of the two.

“Here,” he panted, “hands off, now.  There’s no need for all this violence.  There’s no great harm in looking at a fight, is there?  There’s a hundred-dollar bill in my right hand; take it and let me slip out of this.  No one is looking.  Here.”

But the detective only held him the closer.

“I want you for burglary,” he whispered under his breath.  “You’ve got to come with me now, and quick.  The less fuss you make, the better for both of us.  If you don’t know who I am, you can feel my badge under my coat there.  I’ve got the authority.  It’s all regular, and when we’re out of this d—–­d row I’ll show you the papers.”

He took one hand from Hade’s throat and pulled a pair of handcuffs from his pocket.

“It’s a mistake.  This is an outrage,” gasped the murderer, white and trembling, but dreadfully alive and desperate for his liberty.  “Let me go, I tell you!  Take your hands off of me!  Do I look like a burglar, you fool?”

“I know who you look like,” whispered the detective, with his face close to the face of his prisoner.  “Now, will you go easy as a burglar, or shall I tell these men who you are and what I do want you for?  Shall I call out your real name or not?  Shall I tell them?  Quick, speak up; shall I?”

There was something so exultant—­something so unnecessarily savage in the officer’s face that the man he held saw that the detective knew him for what he really was, and the hands that had held his throat slipped down around his shoulders, or he would have fallen.  The man’s eyes opened and closed again, and he swayed weakly backward and forward, and choked as if his throat were dry and burning.  Even to such a hardened connoisseur in crime as Gallegher, who stood closely by, drinking it in, there was something so abject in the man’s terror that he regarded him with what was almost a touch of pity.