The other Dusters took a couple of steps forward, like they might charge; but they were still too confused to take definite action. I could tell, though, that said situation wasn’t going to last very long: I pulled on the Doctor’s sleeve, nodding my head in the direction of the river and trying to tell him I knew a full-scale battle was about to break out and that while it was raging we’d do best to get back down to West Street and come at Libby Hatch’s house from another direction. He got the message, and as the sailors closed ranks and got ready to receive the coming attack, all of our group started to walk slowly backward-all, that is, excepting Cyrus, who’d locked eyes with Ding Dong and wasn’t going anywhere.
Second by second the air got more and more charged; then Knox, his forehead bleeding, gathered his wits, looked up at his boys, and shouted, “Well? What the hell’re you waiting for?”
At that the storm finally broke. In a solid, screaming wall the Dusters rushed forward, and the sailors did likewise. Both sides mixed it up so fast that the use of pistols by either group became pretty near an impossibility from the start. It’d be a contest of fists and sticks, that much was obvious, and it’d likely take up the whole block we were standing on: we had to get away fast.
“Run!” I told Mr. Moore, who nodded and, together with the detective sergeants, started to dash west. Miss Howard and the Doctor, though, hung back, waiting for Cyrus.
“Cyrus!” the Doctor commanded, as Miss Howard covered our big friend with her Colt. “Come with us, now!”
But Cyrus was way beyond taking any orders: as soon as the brawl’d erupted he’d reached out to grab Ding Dong by the shirt, then literally lifted him off the ground and thrown him about six feet behind the line of our sailors, where he wouldn’t be able to get any help from his pals. Hitting the ground hard, Ding Dong’d dropped the stick he was carrying, and Cyrus quickly kicked it away. Then he pulled Ding Dong to his feet and said:
“No sticks, no knives, no guns-and I’m no fourteen-year-old girl, either. Now let’s see how you do.” With that he started to pummel the Duster, who had to work hard to cover himself and get in a few shots of his own.
Sighing once, the Doctor turned to Miss Howard. “We’ll have to leave him, Sara-there is the matter of accounts to be settled. He’ll be all right, but we must go!”
Nodding reluctantly, Miss Howard turned her body west but kept her eyes on Cyrus-and it was a good thing she did, being as just as we started to move away two Dusters managed to break out of the brawl further up the street and ran over to try to give Ding Dong a hand. They were both carrying metal bars wrapped in burlap, and Cyrus had his back to them: once again, it looked like he might get blindsided by the gang.
Miss Howard, though, smoothly spun back around toward the fight, then raised her Colt and, holding it steady with both hands, let off two rounds, their explosions echoing off the buildings and the cobblestones thunderously. When the smoke of the shots cleared, the two Dusters with the metal bars were lying on the ground, each one clutching at a shattered kneecap. Miss Howard smiled and, seeing that Cyrus was now pretty well having his way with Ding Dong, turned to follow the rest of us.
Catching me staring at her in amazement, she said only, “I told you, Stevie-there is nothing like a bullet in the leg to make men mind their manners.” Then she pushed me along toward West Street.
The howls of rage and pain from the brawl were now filling the whole neighborhood; and as the six of us ran around the corner to Bank Street, it began to sound like Hell itself had opened up on Bethune Street. Even the longshoremen on the waterfront were keeping clear of the action, and the residents of the neighborhood stayed locked up very tight in their homes: we could hear bolts being thrown on doors as we passed by on our way to Greenwich Street. But the overall effect of the battle turned out to be a helpful one, for as we turned north again and approached Bethune Street, we didn’t catch sight of a single Duster: they’d all gone to join in the “fun.” This left us an open road to Libby Hatch’s place from the east, and in just a few more seconds we’d reached it.
“I doubt,” the Doctor said breathlessly, “whether knocking will prove useful. Detective Sergeants?”
Marcus quickly produced his crowbar, and wedged it into the jamb of the door just to the right of the knob. He and Lucius both laid hold of the thing and got ready to put their full weight and strength into heaving away at it. “When we pull,” Marcus said, sweating as much as his brother by that point, “the rest of you try to push on the door itself. Sara, I think you’d better keep your Colt at the ready.” As Miss Howard stood back to obey this request, the Doctor, Mr. Moore, and I gathered around to fit into whatever spots we could reach on the door. “Ready?” Marcus asked, and we all grunted replies in the affirmative. “All right, then, one-two-”
As he called out “three!” he pulled hard on the crowbar with Lucius, and the rest of us shoved. The frame of the old door began to crack and splinter almost right away, and a few more good blows and yanks destroyed the right side of the structure completely. With a kick Marcus burst the door open, and then we all stepped to either side very fast, so that Miss Howard could train her gun immediately on-
Nothing. There was no sign of life in the little entry way to the house, and the steps against the right-hand wall led up into darkness what showed a similar lack of human activity. Miss Howard led the way in, still keeping her Colt trained on the darkness, and then the rest of us followed, frightened, yes, but also starting to feel tremendous disappointment.
“She can’t,” the Doctor whispered. “She can’t have slipped away again …”
Inching our way into the dark house, we began to spread out, Lucius producing his revolver and taking a couple of steps up the stairway. He would’ve gone farther, followed by Mr. Moore and Marcus-but then we heard the sudden sound of a door slamming in the sitting room. There was only one such structure in that area, I knew that from my last visit:
“The basement door,” I whispered, and then the three men on the stairs came back down. Again on Marcus’s count, we all burst into the sitting area, led by Miss Howard and Lucius.
But the room was too dark to reveal much of anything, at first, except the general outlines of the furniture nearest to us and the entrance to the kitchen hallway at the back. Which was why the voice, when we heard it come out of the shadows, was all the more frightening:
“It doesn’t matter, now,” said Libby Hatch, very quietly. “You’ve found your way into the house-but you’ll never find what you came for.”
Lucius opened his mouth, seeming like he wanted to announce to the woman that she was under arrest, but the Doctor touched his arm, and spoke in a calm voice: “Listen to me, Elspeth Franklin-you need not face death-”
But Libby Hatch only spat and cursed, “Damn you all!”
Then we saw the sudden movement of a shadow in the hallway, going toward the kitchen. It was nothing more than the briefest blur, and it was followed, much to our increasing confusion and frustration, by the sound of feet climbing upwards.
“Stairs,” the Doctor said. “There are back stairs!”
“I sure as hell never saw ’em,” I said.
“She may have had a concealed passageway built,” Marcus offered, “when she had Bates reconstruct the basement.”
“One which will no doubt prove as difficult to enter as the chamber below,” the Doctor agreed with an agitated nod. “Quickly, then-Marcus, you, Lucius, and Moore get downstairs! See what you can do to break into the chamber! Sara, you and Stevie come with me!”
With the sounds of the brawl still echoing out on the street, we all exploded off in our assigned directions, the men heading down the basement steps and Miss Howard and I following the Doctor up the staircase, past the second floor and on to the third. There we found a steel ladder what led to a hatchway in the ceiling. Miss Howard led the way up it and, opening the thing, tried to quickly jump out onto the roof.