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He continued, "Jones will be here at three--cowhide him. Gillespie will
call earlier, perhaps--throw him out of the window. Ferguson will be
along about four--kill him. That is all for today, I believe. If you
have any odd time, you may write a blistering article on the police--give
the chief inspector rats. The cowhides are under the table; weapons in
the drawer--ammunition there in the corner--lint and bandages up there in
the pigeonholes. In case of accident, go to Lancet, the surgeon,
downstairs. He advertises--we take it out in trade."
He was gone. I shuddered. At the end of the next three hours I had been
through perils so awful that all peace of mind and all cheerfulness were
gone from me. Gillespie had called and thrown me out of the window.
Jones arrived promptly, and when I got ready to do the cowhiding he took
the job off my hands. In an encounter with a stranger, not in the bill
of fare, I had lost my scalp. Another stranger, by the name of Thompson,
left me a mere wreck and ruin of chaotic rags. And at last, at bay in
the corner, and beset by an infuriated mob of editors, blacklegs,
politicians, and desperadoes, who raved and swore and flourished their
weapons about my head till the air shimmered with glancing flashes of
steel, I was in the act of resigning my berth on the paper when the chief
arrived, and with him a rabble of charmed and enthusiastic friends. Then
ensued a scene of riot and carnage such as no human pen, or steel one
either, could describe. People were shot, probed, dismembered, blown up,
thrown out of the window. There was a brief tornado of murky blasphemy,
with a confused and frantic war-dance glimmering through it, and then all
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