I rushed my burden to one of the side-couches and dropped him on to a sleeping opium smoker, who rolled to the floor with a curse. The next instant I was yelling at the top of my lungs, and the two Chinks were making at me from different directions. Luckily, my father had taught me as a boy the sovereign virtue of a straight left--a bit of education that has stood me in better stead than all he ever imparted out of his primers. I hit out, caught the nearest of my attackers on the point of his weedy chin, and sent him spinning back amongst the crowd. The other came on, and received a like dissuader from my right. Neither blow was a true king hit, however, and neither Chink was anything near knocked out: on the contrary, the setback only seemed to have whipped up all the venom in the pair of them, and there they crouched, spitting curses, amongst which I caught the repeated epithet of "foreign devil." This was disquieting. So far, the sense of the room seemed to be a sort of armed neutrality, but I knew that if this villainous partnership succeeded in inflaming popular feeling on the score of race, I shouldn't last the minute out. I yelled again for the police, all I knew how. The bottle man had dropped the bottle, and I caught the glint of a knife in his hand. I snatched out my revolver. I had intended to use this only in the last resort, but there was nothing else for it now. The fellow sprang at me with a hiss, and I distinctly remember how my slow, erring senses coupled that sound with the flash of the knife as it swept up in a half-circle. I aimed as low as possible, but there is no guaranteeing results in an affair like that. I am much afraid the bullet took my gentleman in the entrails and put a period to his crimes there and then. He had his revenge, however. With the firing of that shot the sympathies of the room turned very definitely against me. There was an ugly movement in the crowd. I swept the front rank with my gun, and they drew back a little--only a little, but long enough to allow me to dash forward and snatch the knife out of the dead man's hand and get back to the couch by the wall. The crowd resented this move. A howl of rage went up. Those in a position to know say the howling of an angry Chinese mob is the most terrible sound in this world, and I agree. The end couldn't be long coming. One rush, and I must be overwhelmed and meet such a handling as the mind would not picture. On they came. I fired into the brown--two, three, four, five, six--and at the last report felt a sudden sharp sting in my wrist and heard the empty revolver clatter to the floor. Somebody had thrown a knife.