Yulowski handled his rifle lovingly, and once again his teeth showed in a wolfish grin.
“Which shall I take first, chief?” he said carelessly.
“The point is immaterial,” returned Peterson. “I think perhaps the woman.”
Drummond tried to speak and failed. His tongue was clinging to the roof of his mouth: everything in the room was dancing before his eyes. Dimly he saw the redheaded brute Yulowski swinging his rifle to test it: dimly he saw Phyllis sitting bolt upright, with a calm scornful expression on her face, while two men held her by the arms so that she could not move. And suddenly he croaked horribly.
Then he saw Yulowski put down the rifle and listen intently for a moment.
“What’s the matter?” snapped Peterson irritably.
“Do you hear the different note to that dynamo?” said Yulowski.
“What the hell’s that got to do with it?” roared Peterson. “Get on with it, damn you—and attend to the dynamo afterwards.”
Yulowski nodded, and picked up his rifle again.
“The last time,” he said, turning on Drummond with a dreadful look of evil in his face, “that this rifle was used by me was in a cellar in Russia—on even more exalted people than you. I brought it specially with me as a memento, never thinking I should have the pleasure of using it again.”
He swung it over his head, and Drummond shut his eyes—to open them again a moment later, as the door flung open and a man distraught with terror dashed in.
“The Black Gang!” he shouted wildly. “Hundreds of them—all round the house. They’ve cut the wires.”
With a fearful curse Peterson leaped to his feet, and the men holding Drummond, dumbfounded at the sudden turning of the tables, let go of his arms. Yulowski stood staring foolishly at the door, and what happened then was so quick that none of the stupefied onlookers raised a finger to prevent it.
With the howl of an enraged beast, Drummond hurled himself on the Russian—blind mad with fury. And when two seconds later a dozen black-cowled, black-hooded figures came swarming in through the door, for one instant they paused in sheer horror.
Pinned to the wall with his own bayonet, which stuck out six inches beyond his back was a redheaded, red-bearded man gibbering horribly in a strange language; whilst creeping towards a benevolent-looking clergyman, who crouched in a corner, was a man they scarce recognized as their leader, so appalling was the look of malignant fury on his face.
Carl Peterson was no coward. In the world in which he moved, there were many strange stories told of his iron nerve and his complete disregard of danger. Moreover Nature had endowed him with physical strength far above the average. But now, for perhaps the first time in his life, he knew the meaning of stark, abject terror.
The sinister men in black—members of that very gang he had come over to England to destroy—seemed to fill the room. Silently, as if they had been drilled to it, they disarmed everyone: then they stood round the walls—waiting. No one spoke: only the horrible imprecations of the dying Russian broke the silence, as he strove feebly to pull out the rifle and bayonet from his chest, which had fixed him to the wall as a dead butterfly is fixed in a collection with a pin.
Peterson had a fleeting vision of a girl with white face and wide, staring eyes beside whom were standing two of the motionless black figures as guards—the girl whom he had just sentenced to a dreadful and horrible death, and then his eyes came back again as if fascinated to the man who was coming towards him. He tried to shrink back further into his corner, plucking with nerveless fingers at his clerical collar—while the sweat poured off his face in a stream. For there was no mercy in Hugh Drummond’s eyes: no mercy in the great arms that hung loosely forward. And Peterson realized he deserved none.
And then it came. No word was spoken—Drummond was beyond speech. His hands shot out and Peterson felt himself drawn relentlessly towards the man he had planned to kill, not two minutes before. It was his turn now to wonder desperately if it was some hideous nightmare, even while he struggled impotently in his final frenzy with a man whose strength seemed equal to the strength of ten. He was choking: the grip on his throat was not human in its ferocity. There was a great roaring in his ears, and suddenly he ceased to struggle. The glare in Drummond’s eyes hypnotized him, and for the only time in his life he gave up hope.
The room was spinning round: the silent black figures, the dying Yulowski, the girl—all seemed merged in one vast jumble of colour growing darker and darker, out of which one thing and one thing only stood out clear and distinct on his dying consciousness—the blazing eyes of the man who was throttling him. And then, as he felt himself sinking into utter blackness, some dim sense less paralyzed than the rest seemed to tell him that a change had taken place in the room. Something new had come into that whirling nightmare that spun round him: dimly he heard a voice—loud and agonised—a voice he recognized. It was a woman’s voice, and after a while
