Jimmie Dale fired--wide.

Tight as was the corner he was in, little as was the mercy deserved at his hands, he could not, after all, bring himself to shoot--to kill.
A voice, the Skeeter's, bawled out raucously: "Rush him all together--from different sides at once!" A backward leap! Jimmie Dale's boot was crashing glass and frame, stamping at it desperately, making a hole for his body through the skylight.

A yell, a chorus of them, answered this--then the crunch of racing feet on the gravel roof.

He emptied his revolver, sweeping the darkness with a semicircle of vicious flashes.
It seemed an hour--it was barely the fraction of a second, as he hung by his hands from the side of the skylight frame, his body swinging back and forth in the unknown blackness below.

The skylight might be, probably was, directly over the stair well, and open clear to the basement of the house--but it was his only chance.