What prevented Creegan from repeating his maneuver with the night-stick I could not tell. But I knew the second attack was not the clean-cut job of the first, for even as Creegan seized the body half-way up through the opening, the struggle must have begun. The consciousness that that struggle was not to be promptly decided, that a third factor might at any moment appear in the fight, stung me into the necessity of some sort of blind action on my own part. I remembered the first man, and that he would surely be armed. I ran out toward the center of the room, stumbled over the boxes of gold, and fell sprawling along the floor. Without so much as getting on my feet again I groped about until I found the prostrate body. It took me only a moment to feel about that limp mass, discover the revolver, and draw it from its pocket. I was still on my knees when I heard Creegan call out through the darkness. "The light!" he gasped. "Turn on the light!" I swung recklessly about at the note of alarm in his voice and tried to grope my way toward him. Only some last extremity could have wrung that call from him. It was only too plain that his position was now a perilous one. But what that peril was I could not decipher. "Where are you?" I gasped, feeling that wherever he lay he needed help, that the quickest service I could render him would be to reach his side. "The light, you fool!" he cried out. "The light!" I dodged and groped back to the wall where I felt the light-switch to be. I had my fingers actually on the switch when an arm like the arm of a derrick itself swung about through the darkness, and at one stroke knocked the breath out of my body and flattened me against the wall. Before I could recover my breath, a second movement spun me half around and lifted me clear off my feet. By this time the great arm was close about me, pinning my hands down to my side. Before I could cry out or make an effort to escape, the great hulk holding me had shifted his grip, bringing me about directly in front of him and holding me there with such a powerful grasp that it made breathing a thing of torture. And as he held me there, he reached out and turned on the light with his own hand. I knew, even before I actually saw him, that it was the third man. I also knew, even before that light came on, what his purpose was. He was holding me there as a shield in front of him. This much I realized even before I saw the revolver with which he was menacing the enemy in front of him. What held my blinking and bewildered eyes was the fact that Creegan himself, on the far side of the room, was holding the struggling and twisting body of the man called Redney in precisely the same position. But what disheartened me was the discovery that Creegan held nothing but a night-stick in his left hand. All the strength of his right hand, I could see, was needed to hold his man. And his revolver was still in his pocket.