history of the late Mr. Garniman. The subterranean prospects in each case had been decidedly uninviting; and now the Saint held his fire and wondered what treat was going to be offered him this time.
The cigar-chewing escort stopped at the foot of the steps, and the Saint was led on alone into a small bare room. From the threshold, the negro flung him forward into a far corner, and turned to lock the door behind him. He put the key in his pocket, took off his coat, and rolled up his sleeves; and all the time his dark blazing eyes were riveted upon the Saint.
And then he picked up a great leather whip from the floor, and his thick lips curled back from his teeth in a ghastly grin.
'You will not talk, no?' he said.
He swung his arm; and the long lash whistled and crackled through the air, and snaked over the Saint's shoulders like the recoiling snap of an overstrained hawser.
Chapter VIII
Simon reeled away in a slash of agony that ate into his chest as if a thin jet of boiling acid had been sprayed across his back.
And he went mad.
Never, otherwise, could he have accomplished what he did. For one blinding instant, which branded itself on his optic nerves with such an eye-aching clarity that it might have stood for an eternity of frozen stillness, he saw everything there was to see in that little room. He saw the stained grey walls and ceiling and the dusty paving underfoot; he saw the locked door; he saw the towering figure of the gigantic hate-vengeful negro before him, and the cyclopean muscles swelling and rippling under the thin texture of the lavender silk shirt; and he saw himself. Just for that instant he saw those things as he had never seen anything before, with every thought of everything else and every other living soul in the world wiped from his mind like chalk marks smeared from a smooth board. . . .
And then a red fog bellied up before his eyes, and the stillness seemed to burst inwards like the smithereening of a great glass vacuum bulb.
He felt nothing more—in that white heat of berserk fury, the sense of pain was simply blotted out. He dodged round the room by instinct, ducking and swerving mechanically, and scarcely knew when he succeeded and when he failed.
And at his wrists he felt nothing at all.
The buckle of the strap there was out of reach of his teeth, but he twisted his hands inwards, one over the other, tightening up the leather with all his strength, till his muscles ached with the strain. He saw the edges of the strap biting into his skin, and the flesh swelling whitely up on either side; the pain of that alone should have stopped him, but there was no such thing. And he stood still and twisted once again, with a concentrated passion of power that writhed over the whole of his upper body like the stirring of a volcano; and the leather broke before his eyes like a strip of tissue paper. . . .
And the Saint laughed:
The whip sang around again, and he leapt in underneath it and caught it as it fell. And what he had intuitively expected happened. The negro jerked at it savagely—and Simon did not resist. But he kept his hold fast, and allowed all the vicious energy of that jerk to merge flowingly into his own unchecked rush; and it catapulted him to his mark like a stone from a sling. His right fist sogged full and square into the negro's throat with a force that jarred the Saint's own shoulder, and Simon found the whip hanging free in his hand.
He stepped back and watched the grin melting out of the contorted black face. The negro's chest heaved up to the encompassing of a great groaning breath, but the shattering mule-power of that pent-up super-auxiliated swipe in the gullet had stunned his thyro-arytenoids as effectively as if a bullet had gone through them. His mouth worked wildly, but he could produce nothing more than an inaudible whisper. And the Saint laughed again, gathering up the whip.
'The boys will be expecting some music,' he said, very gently. 'And you are going to provide it.'
Then the negro sprang at him like a tiger.
That one single punch which had reversed the situation would have sent any living European swooning off into hours of tortured helplessness, but in this case the Saint had never expected any such result from it. It had done all that he had ever hoped that it would do—obliterated the negro's speaking voice, and given the Saint himself the advantage of the one unwieldy weapon in the room. And with the red mists of unholy rage still swilling across his vision, Simon Templar went grimly into the fight of his life.
He sidestepped the negro's first maniac charge as smoothly and easily as a practised pedestrian evading a two-horse dray, and as he swerved he brought the whip cracking round in a stroke that split the lavender silk shirt as crisply as if a razor had been scored across it.
The negro fetched up against the far wall with an animal scream, spun
