There must have been fully thirty men lying in ambush along those treacherous patches of blackness. The odds were hopeless. When he started running, Storm had been making for the Albany entrance; but there had been men hidden in the darkness on either side of the steps, and now these barred his way and their fellows hemmed his retreat via Albany Court Yard. There was only one horse to back. The fact that all the shooting had been aimed at Teal seemed to indicate that the order not to kill Kit still applied. Storm's only chance, then, was to bank on the men obeying orders and try to put the fear of God into them with merciless gunning from his own quarter. Storm took that chance. His two automatics rattled like machine-gun fire, and he saw one after another of the men in front of him go down before that leaden scythe until he had cut a lane through the blockade. Others were already closing in to fill the places of the fallen, but, running like a sprint champion, there might be a thin hope of breaking through before they could take up position. What Storm hadn't--couldn't have--allowed for was the fact that there must always be men behind him. Therefore he didn't see the arms of the two men behind him swing up, didn't see the two skilfully-thrown sandbags hurtle through the air--only felt the dull, sickening impact of something heavy and yet yielding upon the back of his neck, before he crashed to the ground and everything vanished in a whirling infinity of blackness.... He came to on a sofa, with his head throbbing horribly, and his first surprise was to find that he was in his own flat. The second was the presence of a man he knew, who was binding up an ugly wound in Teal's shoulder. "Terry!" called Storm. "How did you get here?" Terry Mannering looked up and smiled, but the haggardness of that ordinarily cheerful young man made the grin unconvincing. "That's all right, brother. You sit tight for a bit and get the bump off your cranium. Havin' a solid ivory skull, you're still livin' when by all rights you ought to be dead--in a large experience of sandbaggin' and divers kindred sports, I may say I've never----" "Cut out the bedside manner, Terry, for the love of Mud!" snarled Storm weakly. "What's happened?" He tried to sit up, and had to make several attempts before he could overcome the sick giddiness that the effort caused. Terry went on bandaging Teal, and tried to infuse flippancy into his tone as he gave the account.