Santoine at once recognized the sound as a shot; but in the instant of waking, he had not been able to place it more definitely than to know that it was close. His hand went at once to the bellboard, and he rang at the same time for the nurse outside his door and for the steward. But for a few moments after that first shot, nothing followed; there was silence. Santoine was not one of those who doubt their hearing; that was the sense in which the circumstances of his life made him implicitly trust; he had heard a shot near by; the fact that nothing more followed did not make him doubt it; it made him think to explain it. It was plain that no one else in the house had been stirred by it; for his windows were open and other windows in bedrooms in the main part of the house were open; no one had raised any cry of alarm. So the shot was where he alone had heard it; that meant indoors, in the room below. Santoine pressed the bells quickly again and sat up straighter and more strained; no one breaking into the house for plate or jewelry would enter through that room; he would have to break through double doors to reach any other part of the house; Santoine did not consider the possibility of robbery of that sort long enough to have been said to consider it at all; what he felt was that the threat which had been hanging vaguely over himself ever since Warden's murder was being fulfilled. But it was not Santoine himself that was being attacked; it was something Santoine possessed. There was only one sort of valuable article for which one might enter that room below. And those articles-- The blind man clenched his jaw and pressed the bells to call all the men-servants in the house and Avery also. But still he got no response. A shot in the room below meant, of course, that in addition to the intruder there must be a defender; the defender might have been the one who fired or the one who was killed. For it seemed likely, in the complete silence now, that whoever had fired had disposed of his adversary and was undisturbed. At that moment the second shot--the first fired at Eaton--rang out below; Eaton's return fire followed nearly simultaneously, and then the shot of the third man. These explosions and the next three the blind man in bed above was able to distinguish; there were three men, at least, in the room below firing at each other; then, as the automatic revolvers roared on, he no longer could separate attack and reply; there might be three men, there might be half a dozen; the fusillade of the automatics overlapped; it was incessant. Then all at once the firing stopped; there was no sound or movement of any sort; everything seemed absolutely still below.