RANSVESTIA

chance contacted the man's boot. Harry grasped it and pulled. There was a shuffling sound and a sharp thump and the body crumpled to the side of him like a stone. Cowboy boots had tripped and fallen, skulling himself on the angled corner of a wooden counter on the way down. He was out cold.

The suddenness of this confrontation left Harry breathless and a little flustered if not unnerved. It had all happened very fast. Harry pulled himself to his feet and surveyed the scene looking for his pistol. It was nowhere in sight. After a moment he found it under the fallen burglar's body. The round he had fired accidentally had struck a dress mannequin ten feet away in a floor display squarely in the chest. The smiling plaster lady had been knocked backwards from her perch and now rested at a crazy angle against a rack of dresses. There seemed to be broken glass around his feet. Apparently cowboy boots eyeglasses had been smashed in the melee.

Having secured the pistol Harry's thoughts turned immediately to the task at hand and the third burglar. Cowboy boots was already moan- ing and showing definite signs of regaining consciousness. Nearby was a wrack of packaged nylon hosiery. Harry ripped open several of the plastic containers and bound cowboy boots hands and feet securely before dragging him behind a counter out of view of the escalator shaft. A hasty search of cowboy boots revealed no weapons.

Miraculously he had taken care of two of the burglars. But there was a third and the third burglar was the largest of the three and probably the most dangerous. Harry felt certain that the sound of the gunshot had carried sufficiently in the empty building to be heard on the floor below. What would the big man's reaction to the shot be Harry won- dered. Several minutes at least perhaps five minutes at the most had elapsed since the pistol had fired. That was time enough for the big man to have come to his companion's aid if he had been so inclined. But the store was deathly quiet now. There was not a sound to be heard though Harry's ears strained for some indication of the remaining burglar's whereabouts. Harry watched the escalator opening expectantly for a minute before it occurred to him that the third man might very well have been frightened by the gunshot. For all the big man knew his partner had been killed or wounded by that shot. Perhaps the big man was even now waiting on the fourth floor as expectantly as Harry was waiting on the fifth waiting for either his partner or a gun-toting nightwatchman to appear. The longer the wait the more certain the big man could be that the nightwatchman was victorious. In any case,

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