The lights went out.
In the black dark we stood, stood until I could almost see the outlines of the windows; less black against the intenser blackness.
Soon I heard another click, and the grate of an opened door. Then a kind of snarl, a thump like a blow, a sort of strangling gasp, and the cushiony sounds of a struggle.
Thwaite turned on the lights.
Rivvin was in the act of staggering up from his knees. I saw a pair of small, pink hands, the fingers intertwined, locked behind Rivvin's neck. They slipped apart as I caught sight of them.
I had a vision of small feet in little patent leather silver-buckled low-shoes, of green socks, of diminutive legs in white trousers flashing right and left in front of Rivvin, as if he held by the throat a struggling child.
Next I saw that his arms were thrown up, wide apart.
He collapsed and fell back his full length with a dull crash. Then I saw the snout!
Saw the wolf-jaws vised on his throat!
Saw the blood welling round the dazzling white fangs, and recognized the reality of the sinister head I had seen over and over in his pictures.
Rivvin made the fish-out-of-water contortions of a man being killed. Thwaite brought his slung-shot down on the beast-head skull.
The blow was enough to crush in a steel cylinder. The beast wrinkled its snout and shook its head from side to side, worrying like a bull-dog at Rivvin's throat.
Again Thwaite struck and again and again. At each blow the portentous head oscillated viciously. The awful thing about it to me was the two blue bosses on each side of the muzzle, like enamel, shiny and hard looking; and the hideous welt of red, like fresh sealing-wax, down between them and along the snout.
Rivvin's struggles grew weaker as the great teeth tore at his throat. He was dead before Thwaite's repeated blows drove in the splintered skull and the clenched jaws relaxed, the snout crinkling and contracting as the dog- teeth slid from their hold.
Thwaite gave the monster two or three more blows, touched Rivvin and fairly dashed out of the room, shouting.
“You stay here!”
I heard the sound of prying and sawing. There alone I looked but once at the dead cracksman. The thing that had killed him was the size of a four to six year old child, but more stockily built, looked entirely human up to the neck, and was dressed in a coat of bright dark blue, a vest of crimson velvet, and white duck trousers. As I looked the muzzle wriggled for the last time, the jaws fell apart and the carcass rolled sideways. It was the very duplicate in miniature of the figure in the big picture on the staircase landing.
Thwaite came dashing back. Without any sign of any qualm he searched Rivvin and tossed me two or three bundles of greenbacks.
He stood up.
He laughed.
“Curiosity,” he said, “will be the death of me.” Then he stripped the clothing from the dead monster, kneeling by it.
The beast-hair stopped at the shirt collar. Below that the skin was human, as was the shape, the shape of a forty-year-old man, strong and vigorous and well-made, only dwarfed to the smallness of a child.
Across the hairy breast was tatooed in blue,
“HENGIST EVERSLEIGH.”
“Hell,” said Thwaite.
He stood up and went to the fatal door. Inside he found the electric button. The room was small and lined with cases of little drawers, tier on tier, rows of brass knobs on mahogany.
Thwaite opened one.
It was velvet lined and grooved like a jeweler's tray and contained rings, the settings apparently emeralds.
Thwaite dumped them into one of the empty bags he had taken from Rivvin's corpse. The next case was of similar drawers of rings set with rubies. The first of these Thwaite dumped in with the emeralds.
But then he flew round the room pulling out drawers and slamming them shut, until he came upon trays of unset diamonds. These he emptied into his sack to the last of them, then diamond rings on them, other jewelry set with diamonds, then rubies and emeralds till the sack was full.
He tied its neck, had me open a second sack and was dumping drawer after drawer into that when suddenly he stopped.
His nose worked, worked horridly like that of the dead monster.
I thought he was going crazy and was beginning to laugh nervously, was on the verge of hysterics when he said:
“Smell! Try what you smell.” I sniffed. “I smell smoke,” I said.
“So do I,” he agreed. “This place is afire.”
“And we locked in!” I exclaimed.
“Locked in?” he sneered. “Bosh. I broke open the front door the instant I was sure they were dead. Come! Drop that empty bag. This is no time for haggling.”
We had to step between the two corpses. Rivvin was horridly dead. The colors had all faded from the snout. The muzzle was all mouse-color.
When we had hold of the bag of coin, Thwaite turned off the electric lights and we struggled out with that and the bag of jewels, and went out into the hallway full of smoke.
“We can carry only these,” Thwaite warned me. “We'll have to leave the rest.” I shouldered the bag of coin, and followed him down the steps, across a gravel road, and, oh the relief of treading turf and feeling the fog all about me.
At the wall Thwaite turned and looked back. “No chance to try for those other bags,” he said. In fact the red glow was visible at that distance and was fast becoming a glare. I heard shouts.
We got the bags over the wall and reached the car. Thwaite cranked up at once and we were off.
How we went I could not guess, nor in what directions, nor even how long. Ours was the only vehicle on the roads we darted along.
When the dawn light was near enough for me to see Thwaite stopped the car. He turned to me.
“Get out!” he said.
“What?” I asked.
He shoved his pistol muzzle in my face. “You've fifty thousand dollars in bank bills in your pockets,” he said. “It's a half a mile down that road to a railway station. Do you understand English? Get out!”
I got out.
The car shot forward into the morning fog and was gone.
He was silent a long time.
“What did you do then?” I asked. “Headed for New York,” he said, “and got on a drunk. When I came round I had barely eleven thousand dollars. I headed for Cook's office and bargained for a ten thousand dollar tour of the world, the most places and the longest time they'd give for the money; the whole cost on them. I not to need a cent after I started.”
“What date was that?” I asked.
He meditated and gave me some approximate indications rather rambling and roundabout. “What did you do after you left Cook's?” I asked.
“I put a hundred dollars in a savings bank,” he said. “Bought a lot of clothes and things and started.
“I kept pretty sober all round the world because the only way to get full was by being treated and I had no cash to treat back with.
“When I landed in New York I thought I was all right for life. But no sooner did I have my hundred and odd dollars in my pockets than I got full again. I don't seem able to keep sober.”
“Are you sober now?” I asked. “Sure,” he asserted.
He seemed to shed his cosmopolitan vocabulary the moment he came back to everyday matters.
