I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my up-thrust wrist. I knew then that it was useless to try to reach him. I simply brought my arm forward and let the metal pot fly from my hand. I let it fly forward, targeting on his white and distorted face. Where or how it struck I could not tell. All I knew was that he went down under a scattering geyser of black coffee. He did not fire again. He did not even move. But as he fell the woman in the cap and apron dropped on her knees beside him. She knelt there with an inarticulate cry like that of an animal over its fallen mate, a ludicrous, mouse-like sound that was almost a squeak. Then she suddenly edged about and reached out for the fallen revolver. I saw her through the smoke, but she had the gun in her hand before I could stop her. She fought over it like a wildcat. The peril of that combat made me desperate. Her arm was quite thin, and not overly strong. I first twisted it so the gun-barrel pointed outward. The pain, as I continued to twist, must have been intense. But I knew it was no time for half-measures. Just how intense that pain was came home to me a moment later, when the woman fell forward on her face, in a dead faint. The other woman had calmly thrown open the windows. She watched me, almost apathetically, as I got to my feet and stooped in alarm over the unconscious man in his ridiculous welter of black coffee. Then she stepped closer to me. "Have you killed him?" she asked, with more a touch of childlike wonder than any actual fear. "No; he's only stunned." "But how?" "It caught him here on the forehead. He'll be around in a minute or two." Once more I could hear the multitudinous rustle as she crossed the room. "Put him here on my bed," she called from an open door. And as I carried him in and dropped him in a sodden heap on the white coverlet, I saw the woman unsheathe her writhing body of its rose-colored wrapping. From that flurry of warmth her twisting body emerged almost sepulchrally white. Then she came to a pause, bare-shouldered and thoughtful before me. "Wait!" she said as she crossed the room. "I must telephone McCausland." "Who's McCausland?" I asked as she stepped out into the dining-room. "He's a man I know at Headquarters," was her impersonal-noted reply. For the second time, as she stepped hurriedly back into the room with me, I was conscious of the satin-like smoothness of her skin, the baby-like whiteness of her rounded bare arms. Then wholly unabashed by my presence, she flung open a closet door and tossed a cascade of perfumed apparel out beside the bed where I stood.