“Oh, my girl, my little girl!  Leave her alone, you demons!” gasped the helpless doctor.  But just as the fingers loosed their brutal grasp on the father’s throat to reach for the frail, delicate flesh of the daughter’s, straight as a carpenter’s leaden plumb there crashed on to the top of the assailant’s head a huge, polished brass bowl.  The man fell, limp, senseless as a corpse.  His confederate whirled on his heel, and fired his revolver twice rapidly above his head, just missing Buck.

Connie shrieked, and the next moment the big, unclean fingers had locked themselves about her throat, and she was forced to her knees, while a guttural voice said:  “Scream, will you!  Well, try it! This is what you get!”

For weeks Buck’s ears rang with that awful, smothered cry of his young mistress, of the tortured voice of the doctor, helplessly choking, “Oh, my girl!  My daughter!” But by this time Buck was three steps from the bottom, and the back of the burglar was toward him as he crouched over the struggling girl, choking the screams in her delicate throat.  Like a vampire, Buck sprang from the third stair, landing on the man’s back, his legs worked inside the man’s elbows, pinioning the scoundrel’s arms back like a trussed turkey, his arms went round the bull-like neck, and his tough young fingers closed on a sinewy throat.  He clung to the creature’s back like an octopus, while they rolled over and over, and the terrified girl struggled up, regaining her breath.

“Quick! quick!  Miss Connie!  The telephone!  The police!  Ring!  Ring!” Buck managed to shout.  Then, “Untie the doctor’s hands and feet!”

But the burglar’s arms were now gripping behind him, and digging, cruel fingers pierced Buck’s flesh.  But the boy never relaxed his octopus hold.  The tighter the big nails clutched, the tighter his own boyish fingers stiffened on the man’s throat.

An eternity seemed to elapse.  He saw Miss Connie fly to the telephone, then her weak little hands struggled with the ropes on her father’s wrists.  But before she could begin to loose them, four gigantic men in blue uniforms were climbing in the open surgery window to encounter a sight not soon to be forgotten.  The doctor, bound and bruised, lay on the floor; beside him, a man rapidly regaining consciousness and sitting up in a dazed condition; a young girl, with brutal red marks about her throat; and on the floor at her feet a man with a boy clinging to his back like a barnacle to a boat, his young arms and bare legs binding the fellow like ropes.  It took those police officers but the twinkling of an eye to have the two burglars handcuffed and cowed at the point of their revolvers, and to hear the whole story of the rescued doctor.

“But who’s this little duffer?” asked the inspector, gazing at Buck.  “Why, look at his knees and feet!  They’re dripping blood!”

“Got that shinning up the creeper and the stone-wall into the bathroom,” said Buck, feeling terribly awkward to be seen in such a plight before Miss Connie.  So he stammered out his explanation, from the moment he had awakened to this very instant.