With a thick sob, the boy reeled and swung against the wall as sharply
as though he had been struck with a sledge-hammer.
Whimpering with rage, P. Sybarite tugged at the weapon; but it stuck
fast, caught the lining of his coat-pocket.
Most happily before he could get it in evidence, the door was thrust
sharply in, and through it with a rush materialised that most rare of
metropolitan phenomena--the policeman on the spot.
Young and ardent, with courage as unique as his ubiquity, he blustered
in like a whirlwind, brushing P. Sybarite to one side, the wounded boy
to the other, and pausing only a single instant to throw back the
skirts of his tunic and grasp the butt of the revolver in his
hip-pocket, demanded in the voice of an Irish stentor:
"_What's-all-this? What's-all-this-now?_"
"Robbery!" P. Sybarite replied, mastering with difficulty a giggle of
hysterical relief. "Robbery and attempted murder! Arrest that man--Red
November--with the gun in his hand."
With an inarticulate roar, the patrolman swung on toward the
gangster--and P. Sybarite plucked the boy by the sleeve and drew him
quickly to the sidewalk.
By the never-to-be-forgotten grace of _Kismet_ his taxicab was
precisely where he had left it, the chauffeur on the seat.
"Quick!" he ordered the reeling boy--"into that cab unless you want to
be treated by a Bellevue sawbones--held as a witness besides.
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