"
Then I saw that Wainwright had come forward, despite my bidding, eager
to take his share of the onslaught. And by some freak of the spirit of
the perverse the boy, who had shown himself so timid during the day,
had now slipped out of his room and climbed upon a chair to see what
the excitement was about, as though danger and death were the last
things in the world with which he had to reckon.
I caught a glimpse of his form out of the tail of my eye as he mounted
the chair in his night-dress. I turned with an exclamation to
Wainwright and was leaping to cover him from a possible bullet, when
there was a roar of rage and the voice of Terrill rang through the
hall:
"Tricked again!" he cried with a dreadful oath. "It's the wrong boy!"
CHAPTER XXIV
ON THE ROAD
The wrong boy!
For a moment I could not understand nor believe; and when the meaning
of the words came to me, I groped in mental darkness, unable to come in
touch with the significant facts by which I was surrounded. The solid
earth had fallen from under me, and I struggled vainly to get footing
in my new position.
But there was no time for speculation. Half in a daze I heard a roar of
curses, orders, a crash of glass as the lamp was extinguished, and over
all came the prolonged growl of a wolf-voice, hoarse and shaken with
anger. There was a vision of a wolf-head rising above the outline of
faces a few yards away, dark, distorted, fierce, with eyes that blazed
threats, and in an instant I found myself in the center of a
struggling, shouting, swearing mass of savage men, fighting with naught
but the instinct of blind rage.
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