He hunched his muscular shoulders abruptly-it was the only movement he made.
'Is that a threat?' he asked.
'No.' Simon was just as quiet. 'It's a promise. When the police arrive they're going to find that there's been another accident. And the fact will be that you, Jones, also fell against that machine.'
CHAPTER VIII THE BIG MAN leapt forward as he finished speaking. Simon knew that that was coming-he was ready and waiting for it. There was no other way about it; and he had been prepared for it ever since one question had been answered. He had never intended to shoot after they returned to the laboratory, whatever happened; but he snatched his gun away out of range of the wild grab that Jones made for it, and tossed it neatly across to Patricia. She caught it at her knees; and the Saint slipped under the big man's arms and jammed him against the door. For an instant they strained against each other face to face; and the Saint drew a deep breath and spoke over his shoulder.
'Don't shoot, Pat,' he said. 'Get over in the corner and stay out of the way. The gun's for you to get out with if anything goes wrong.'
The big man heaved up off the door in a mighty jerk and hurled the Saint back with all the impetus of his superior weight. He shook off the Saint's grip with a writhing effort of his arms-Simon felt the man's biceps cording under his hands before the grip was broken, and knew that he was taking on nothing easy. The force of his opponent's rush drove him to within a yard of the deadly steel dome; then he recovered his balance and stopped the man with a couple of half-arm jolts to the stomach that thudded into their mark like pistons hitting a sandbag. Jones grunted and went back on his heels, dropping his hands to guard; and the Saint shot out a snake-like left for the exposed chin. The big man took it on the side of his jaw, deliberately, and snatched at the flying wrist as the blow landed.
His fingers closed on it like iron clamps, twisting spitefully. He had every ounce of the strength that his build indicated, and he was as hard as teak all over -the Saint had felt that when he landed with those two staggering blows that would have broken most men in the middle. What was more, he had been trained in a school of fighting that knew its stuff: he never gave the Saint a chance to make a boxing match of it. Simon swerved away from the dome and kicked up his knee, but the big man edged back. The Saint's left arm was clamped in an agonizing armlock, and he was wrenched ruthlessly round again towards the dome. The leverage of the hold was bearing him down to his knees; then with a swift terrific kick he straightened his legs under him and swung his right fist over in a smashing blow at the back of the man's neck. The man coughed, and crumpled to his hands and knees; and Simon tore his wrist out of the grip and fell on top of him.
They rolled over together, with the Saint groping for a toehold. One of the big man's insteps came under the palm of his hand, and he hauled it up and bent it over with a brutal efficiency that made his victim gasp. But the big man was wise to that one-the hold only hurt him for a couple of seconds, before he flung it off with a mighty squirm of his body that pitched the Saint over on his face. In an instant the big man's legs were scissoring for a clasp round the Saint's neck and shoulders, and his hands were clamping again on the Saint's wrist. Simon heard his muscles creaking as he strained against the backward pressure that was slowly straightening his arm. Once that arm was locked out straight from the shoulder, with the elbow over the big man's knee joint, he would have to move like a supercharged eel to get away before a bone was snapped like dry wood. He fought it desperately, but it was his one arm against the big man's two; and he knew he was losing inch by inch. His free hand clawed for a nerve centre under one of the thighs that were crushing his chest: he found it, and saw the big man wince, but the remorseless straightening of his arm went on. In the last desperate moment that he had, he struggled to break the nutcracker grip around his upper body. One of the big man's shoes came off in his hand, and with a triumphant laugh he piled all his strength into another toetwist. The man squeaked and kicked, and Simon broke away. As he came up on all fours, the other rolled away. They leapt up simultaneously and circled round each other, breathing heavily.
'Thanks for the fight,' said the Saint shortly. 'I never cared for cold-blooded killings.'
For answer the big man came forward off his toes like a charging bull; but he had not moved six inches before the Saint's swift dash reached him. Again those pile-driving fists jarred on the weak spot just below the other's breastbone. Jones grabbed for a stranglehold, but the drumming of iron knuckles on his solar plexus made him stagger backwards and cover up with his elbows. His mouth opened against the protest of his paralyzed lungs, and his face went white and puffy. Simon drove him to the door and held off warily. He knew that the big man was badly hurt, but perhaps his helplessness looked a little too realistic. . . . The Saint feinted with a left to the head, and in a second the big man was bear-hugging him in a wild rush that almost carried him off his feet.
They went back towards the gleaming dome in a fighting tangle. Simon looked over his shoulder and saw it a yard away, with its brilliant surface shining like silver around the charred blackness of the professor's hand. The strip of wire that he had seen melted on it had left streaky trails of smeared metal down the curved sides, like the slime of a fantastic snail. The Saint saw them in an instant of photographically vivid vision in which the minutest details of that diabolical apparatus were printed forever on his memory. There must have been tens of thousands of volts pulsing invisibly through that section of the secret process, hundreds of amperes of burning annihilation waiting to scorch through the first thing that tapped them with that crackle of blue flame and hiss of intolerable heat which he had seen once and heard again. His shoes slipped over the floor as he wrestled superhumanly against the momentum that was pressing him back towards certain death: the big man's face was cracked in a fiendish grin, and he heard Patricia cry out. . . . Then one of his heels tripped over the professor's outstretched legs, and he was thrown off his balance. He put all his strength into a frantic twist of his body as he fell, and saw the dome leap up beside him, a foot away. The fall knocked half the wind out of his body, and he fought blindly away to one side. Suddenly his hands grasped empty air, and he heard Patricia cry out again.
The splitting detonation of a shot racketed in his ears as he rolled up on one elbow. Patricia had missed, somehow, and the big man was grappling for the gun. Simon crawled up and flung himself forward. As he did so, the big man saw his own gun lying in the corner where the Saint had kicked it, and dived for it. Simon caught him from behind in a circling sweep, locking the big man's arms to his sides at the elbows; but the big man had the gun. The Saint saw it curling round for a backward shot that could not help scoring somewhere: he made a wild grab at the curving wrist and caught it, jerking it up as the trigger tightened, and the shot smashed through the floor. Simon flung his left leg forward, across the big man's stance. The steel dome was a yard away on his left. He heaved sideways, across the leverage of his thigh, and sprang back. . . . The man's scream rang in his ears as he staggered away. Once again that spurt of eye-aching blue flame seared across his eye's and turned suddenly orange. The big man had hit the dome with his shoulder, and his coat was burning; the smell of singeing cloth stung the Saint's nostrils, and the crack of cordite sang through his head as the galvanic current clamped a dead finger convulsively on the trigger and held it there rigidly in one last aimless shot. . . .
'And we still don't know his real name,' murmured the Saint.
He pushed a handkerchief across his brow and looked at Patricia with a crooked grin. Patricia was fingering her wrist tenderly, where the big man's crushing grip had fastened on it. She looked back at the Saint with a pale face that was still hopelessly puzzled.
'That's your fault,' she said.
'I know.' The Saint's eyes had a mocking twist in their inscrutable blue that she couldn't understand. 'You see,
