At this moment, when frankly my chances didn't look worth the hole in a copper cash, help came from a quarter the very least expected. The good-looking Chink sat up, as if roused to life by the repeated shots. He stared about him for the bare fraction of a second, then leapt to his feet. And now followed the most astonishing phase of the whole fight. Darting to the nearest of the fallen, my new ally gripped him by the ankles, and with a miracle of strength I should never have dreamed possible in a man, jerked the limp body above his head and swung it round and round. Twice this terrible human club fell, and twice a swathe of men went down beneath it. 'This way,' he muttered to me in the vernacular, dashing out into the room. The mob drew back, more from amazement than fear, leaving an irregular path between the tumbled chairs and tables. I followed close on my ally's heels. Now we had gained a small door on the far side, to which he nodded. As I flung it open and dashed through I caught over my shoulder a glimpse of the human mace swinging aloft again. My companion had wheeled around, hurled the body at the nearest of the crowd who were already closing in behind us, and followed me through the open door, securing it after him. Together we ran along a short dark corridor, thence out into the open air. The lane in which we found ourselves was surprisingly broad, and at the end of it, to my even greater astonishment, stood a petrol car, a small vehicle, but as it looked to me in the half-lit street, richly finished and built with an eye to speed. The engine throbbed into life at the first swing of the crank, and an instant later we had sprung up and were moving away from the scene of the fight. Our escape, from the moment when my ally recovered consciousness to the time we boarded the automobile, cannot have taken more than half a minute; and as I look back upon it, even after this lapse of months, the whole business seems like a swift, vivid dream. For a while the warren-like ways of this unsavoury district were against us, and I could see, over the folded hood of the car, a dim swirling mob of pursuers and hear their howling with still that high-pitched, unmistakable note of murder in it. Our position was improved, but still nasty in the extreme. Even if we got away from the mob, we should certainly be arrested by the police if caught, in which event there would be several woundings and at least one death to explain, and that, too, against a swarm of witnesses who would swear our lives away without a tinge of compunction.