With a wild shout, Locke charged on them all.
Taken by surprise, the brutes holding Eva were easy to handle, for the others had gone.
Fortunately, the automatic which Eva had been carrying was lying, neglected, on the floor. Locke snatched it up and, shooting one of the thugs, managed to cower the other.
Half supporting Eva, he retreated through the torture-chamber into an outer room. There was no time to lose. Already the alarm had been spread to the other emissaries and Chinamen, and it was only a matter of seconds when all the murderous crew would again be piling after them.
Locke looked about in desperation. There was a window. He flung it open. Below, the air-shaft or court was blind. But there was a balcony by which he could reach an adjoining low roof. He had no idea where it might lead, but any unknown danger was preferable to the known dangers that threatened behind him.
Through the window he passed with Eva, and so across balconies and roofs until they came to a fire-escape, which they descended.
In another moment they were free of Chinatown.
Many a curious glance was cast at them, a young girl, well gowned, and a disheveled white man in Chinese garb.
Locke hailed a night-hawk cabman and they were soon speeding on their way back to safety and Brent Rock.
At the cove fishing-village, set on the extreme outskirts of the town, there stood an old fisherman's shack that was shunned by all the good folk of the city.
While there was nothing definite that could be said of the evil deeds of the inhabitants, there was much shaking of heads and wagging of tongues to the effect that all was not as it should be at the cove.
The owner of the old shack, Old Tom, was an ill-favored, taciturn man who would have naught to do with any of his neighbors, and asked only that they keep out of his path and leave him alone. He even evinced an aversion to dogs and to little children, driving them away from his shack whenever he found them near it.
The threat that "Old Tom will catch you" would make a cove fishing-village tractable at any time.
Old Tom rarely put to sea, and when he did it was more often than not after nightfall, a time when the good folk of the village were preparing for a night's rest.