“There goes five hundred thousand dollars,” said Honey as the Wilmington “Blue” found its last resting-place.  “Shut the door, Pete.”

With another tremendous sweep of her magnificent arm, Julia lifted the chair, swung it about her head as if it were a whip, rushed — not running or flying, but with a movement that was both — upon the five men.  Her companions seized anything that was near.  Lulu wrenched a shelf from its fastenings.

The men closed in upon them.

Twenty minutes later, silence had fallen on the Clubhouse, a silence that was broken only by panted breathing.  The five men stood resting.  The five girls stood, tied to the walls, their hands pinioned in front of them.  At intervals, one or the other of them would call in an agonized tone to Julia.  And always she answered with words that reassured and calmed.

The room looked as if it had housed a cyclone.  The furniture lay in splinters; the feminine loot lay on the floor, trampled and torn.

“I’d like to sit down,” Ralph admitted.  It was the first remark that any one of the men had made.  “Lucky they can’t understand me.  I’d hate them to know it, but I’m as weak as a cat.”

“No sitting down, yet,” Frank commanded, still in his inflexible tones of a disciplinarian.  “Open the door, Pete — get some air in here!” He knelt before a sea-chest which filled one corner of the room, unlocked it, lifted the cover.  The sunlight glittered on the contents.

“My God, I can’t,” said Billy.

“I feel like a murderer,” said Pete.

“You’ve got to,” Frank said in a tone, growing more peremptory with each word.  “Now.”

“That’s right,” said Ralph.  “If we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it.’

Frank handed each man a pair of shears.

“I sharpened them myself,” he said briefly.

Heads over their shoulders, the girls watched.

Did intuition shout a warning to them?  As with one accord, a long wail arose from them, swelled to despairing volume, ascended to desperate heights.

“Now!” Frank ordered.

They had thought the girls securely tied.

Clara fought like a leopardess, scratching and biting.

Lulu struggled like a caged eagle, hysteria mounting in her all the time until the room was filled with her moans.

Peachy beat herself against the wall like a maniac.  She shrieked without cessation.  One scream stopped suddenly in the middle — Ralph had struck her on the forehead.  For the rest of the shearing session she lay over a chair, limp and silent.

Chiquita, curiously enough, resisted not at all.  She only swayed and shrugged, a look of a strange cunning in her long, deep, thick-lashed eyes.  But of them all, she was the only one who attempted to comfort; she talked incessantly.

Julia did not move or speak.  But at the first touch of the cold steel on her bare shoulders, she fainted in Billy’s arms.