Alias | Page 7

so magical was its work; a single blow on the nearest head (but believe it was selected with care!) and instantaneously that knot of contention was resolved into its three several parts.
The smitten clapped hands to his hurt, moaning. His brother scoundrel started back with staring eyes in which rage gave place to dismay as he grasped the change in the situation and saw the stick swinging for his head in turn. He ducked neatly; the stick whistled through thin air; and before Duchemin could recover the other had turned and was running for dear life.
Duchemin delayed a bare instant; but manifestly his assistance was no more needed here. In a breath he who had been so recently outmatched recollected his wits and took the initiative with admirable address. Duchemin saw him fly furiously at his late opponent, trip and lay him on his back; then turned and gave chase to the fugitive.
This was the masquerader in the American uniform; and an amazingly fleet pair of heels he showed, taking into account his heaviness of body. Already he had a fair lead; and had he maintained for long the pace he set in the first few hundred yards he must have won away scot-free. But whether he lacked staying powers or confidence, he made the mistake of adopting another and less fatiguing means of locomotion. Duchemin saw him swerve from his first course and steer for a vehicle standing at some distance--evidently the conveyance which had brought the sightseers to view the spectacle of Montpellier-le-Vieux by moonlight.
Waiting in the middle of a broad avenue of misshapen obelisks, a dilapidated barouche with a low body sagging the lower for debilitated springs, on either side its pole drooped two sorry specimens of crowbait. And their pained amazement was so unfeigned that Duchemin laughed aloud when the fat rogue bounded to the box, snatched up reins and whip and curled a cruel lash round their bony flanks. From this one inferred that he was indifferently acquainted with the animals, certainly not their accustomed driver. And since it took them some moments to come to their senses and appreciate that all this was not an evil dream, Duchemin's hands were clutching for the back of the carriage when the horses broke suddenly into an awkward, lumbering gallop and whisked it out of reach.
But not for long. Extending himself, Duchemin caught the folded top, jumped, and began to clamber in.
The man on the box was tugging fretfully at something wedged in the hip-pocket of his breeches; proof enough that he was not the original tenant of the uniform, since it fitted too snugly to permit ready extraction of a pistol in an emergency.
But he got no chance whatever to use the weapon; for the moment Duchemin found his own feet in the swaying vehicle he leaped on the shoulders of the other and dragged him backwards from the box.
What followed was not very clear to him, a mélange of impressions. The mock-American fought like a devil unchained, cursing Duchemin fluently in the purest and foulest argot of Belleville--which is not in the French vocabulary of the doughboy. The animals at the pole caught fire of this madness and ran away in good earnest, that wretched barouche rolled and pitched like a rudderless shell in a crazy sea, the two men floundered in its well like fish in a pail.
They fought by no rules, with no science, but bit and kicked and gouged and wrenched and struck as occasion offered and each to the best of his ability. Duchemin caught glimpses of a face like a Chinese devil-mask, hideously distorted with working features and disfigured with smears of soot through which insane eyeballs rolled and glared in the moonlight. Then a hand like a vice gripped his windpipe, he was on his back, his head overhanging the edge of the floor, a thumb was feeling for one of his eyes. Yet it could not have been much later when he and his opponent were standing and swaying as one, locked in an embrace of wrestlers.
Still, Duchemin knew as many tricks of hand-to-hand fighting as the other, perhaps a few more. And then he was, no doubt, in far better condition. At all events the fellow was presently at his mercy, in a hold that gave one the privilege of breaking his back at will. A man of mistaken scruples, Duchemin failed to do so, but held the other helpless only long enough to find his hip-pocket and rip out the pistol--a deadly Luger. Then a thrust and a kick, which he enjoyed infinitely, sent the brute spinning out to land on his head.
The fall should have broken his neck. At the worst it should have stunned him. Evidently it didn't. When Duchemin had scrambled up to