Hemming heard and frowned, as he polished his eye-glass on his sleeve. Two shots sounded in quick succession from a room on the left of the hall. Hemming heard Santosa laugh, and O'Rourke congratulate him. The firing now seemed to centre mostly upon the front of the villa. Hemming, as yet, had not returned a shot. Suddenly the white man, moved by a drunken whim, left his hammering at the door, and pranced into the starlight. The shooting of his friends was everywhere. Elevation had little attention from them, and an unusually low ball found him out. He did not spring forward with uplifted hands; neither did he clutch at his breast and stagger onward. With an expression of pained astonishment on his face, and a heave of his fat shoulders, he sank to his hips, and then rolled over and lay still. To Hemming, it looked as if his fat legs had simply crumpled under him like paper. A dozen men charged across the starlit driveway. Hemming dropped two of them. The others ran up the steps and across the veranda, and threw themselves against the door. But they were small men, and the door was a heavy one, and well bolted. Hemming left the window, and at the head of the stairs met O'Rourke. "A brace and a half to me," said that gentleman, lightly. The bitter smoke drifted from doorway to doorway through the dark. Hemming got his sword from his bedroom, and he and O'Rourke waited at the top of the stairs. O'Rourke's heart was glad within him. Shoulder to shoulder with a man like Hemming, it would be a lovely fight. The door could not give in soon enough to suit him. He had ten shots in his revolvers. Then he could break a few heads with his clubbed rifle, surely, and, after that, when they had him down, he could kick for awhile. He did not think of his parents in the North, his friends, his half-written articles, nor his creditors. But he was sorry that Miss Hudson would never hear of his heroic finish. "We have had some fun together, and I hope this will not be the last," said Hemming. They shook hands. Then the door came in with a rending, sidelong fall. A bunch of men sprang across it and made for the staircase, just discernible to them by the light from the doorway. [Illustration: "THE DOOR CAME IN WITH A RENDING, SIDELONG FALL"] "Fire into the brown," said Hemming, quietly.