THE MAN WITH GORILLA ARMS.
The only wonder is that I wasn't killed outright, as would have
happened had my antagonist been as tall as I. But enormously strong
as the Dumpling was, my superior height saved my life. He had struck
at me with a life-preserver heavily loaded with lead, but being many
inches less in stature than I, he had struck short. Hence the blow
which, had it taken me directly on the head, as intended, would have
made a very batter-pudding of my brains, did no more than inflict
a nasty skin-wound, more of a graze than a gash, above one temple.
Even had the blow fallen directly on my shoulder, I should in all
probability have been disabled for the rest of my life. Luckily for
me, however, the loaded life-preserver barely scraped, instead of
smashing, my shoulder-blade, and though for the moment I fell--dazed
and blinded by my own blood--to my knees, my hurts were by no means
serious. As I lay, half stupefied by the suddenness of the attack and
by the blow, yet not too stupefied to forget to shield my head, lest
my antagonist should strike again, I was seized around the waist, by
arms so abnormally long and strong that they were more like those of
a gorilla than of a man, and was carried swiftly to the cellar. To
say that unconsciously I feigned unconsciousness may seem a queer way
of describing what followed; but it is a fact that I lay, apparently
as lifeless, on the cellar floor, as if I had been a spider, shamming
death in the presence of an enemy. And this I did automatically as far
as I can remember, without knowing why I did it.
"I hope he isn't dead, poor devil!" said the Dumpling aloud, to
himself, and in a tone of voice which, in view of the fact that my
death was the fact he had a few moments before had in view, and had,
indeed, done his best to compass, struck me as unnecessarily anxious.
His methods reminded me somewhat of modern warfare, in which we first
do everything in our power to put a bullet into a man, by means of a
gun, and then do everything in our power, by means of good surgery, to
get it out. It always seems to me that--since once we have wounded
a man, our chief anxiety is to restore the _status quo_ by healing
his wound--the desired end might be attained, and the _status quo_
established, by means considerably less expensive to ourselves and
undoubtedly less painful to him.
"I hope he isn't dead," muttered the Dumpling again, laying me down
with surprising gentleness. "It's one of the servants, I suppose, who
has been ordered to be on watch all night in case there's a second
attempt to break into the house, and I have no quarrel with _him_."
As he spoke I suddenly seized him by the legs and toppled him over,
fastening on him like a bulldog the instant he was down. From the first
it was clear that I was wholly outmatched, and had no chance. I had him
on his back, one knee on his chest, and my hands at his throat; but he
put up his two hands very much in the same indifferent way in which
he would have gone to work to fasten--or to unfasten--a collar-stud,
and taking my two wrists, one in each of his fists, he forced them
apart, and away from his neck, as easily as a clamp or a vice opens or
shuts by the twisting of the screw. As if to show his strength, he
held my two hands powerless, thus, for a few seconds, and then with a
contemptuous laugh he swung me away from him and aside, as easily as
a man, who is teaching a child to jump, swings the little one from a
chair to the floor.
What followed I have never ceased to regret. The man had had it in his
power, then and there, to strangle me as I lay. With an antagonist
whose arms were, as I have said, as long and as strong as a gorilla's,
and whose hands held one in a grip of iron, it was useless--athletic
and muscular as I am--to struggle. I was as a child in his grasp;
and, remembering that he had--whether from a contempt which was more
cruel than a blow, or from some instinct of chivalry which made him
disdainful of so puny an opponent--set me free of his own accord,
and, in a sense, thrown my liberty in my face, remembering all this,
I am ashamed to record what followed. The only point to be urged in
my excuse is that I was beside myself with wounded vanity and by the
humiliation which had been put upon me--I was about to have written by
the humiliation of my defeat; but defeat comes after a contest, and
between him and me there had been, thus far, as little appearance of
contest as there is when a strapping nursemaid takes a naughty child
across her knees, and, in spite of the culprit's tears and kicks,
administers the necessary number of smacks. Whether what I have urged,
in extenuation of what I did, will be accounted any excuse by the
reader, I cannot say; but the fact remains that, mad with impotent
anger, and burning for some sort of revenge, I rose to my feet and
struck him, unprepared as he was, full in the face, and with all my
might.
With a snarl like that of a wild beast he closed with me, and for a
few seconds--for my fury seemed temporarily to endow me with a giant's
strength--we rolled over and over, each striving to pin the other to
the ground.
Even at this distance of time, as I seek to recall that moment, I can
well believe that the bloody, bestial savagery of the fight--except for
the short, gasping, hissing intaking and expulsion of breath, we fought
in silence--might have turned a possible onlooker sick with loathing
and disgust. But it was soon over. The strain I had put upon myself,
when first grappling with him, was too terrific to last. My strength
suddenly failed me, and I fell backward, his fingers upon my throat.
In our struggle we had worked our way out of the cellar and into the
passage which led to the garden, and, as I went crashing backward,
I saw for one instant, by the light from the lamp-post in the side
street, that his right hand was already at his hip-pocket in search
of a knife. The next instant he was kneeling on my chest, the knife
upraised to strike--just as I had foreseen in the dream-tableau. As
he bent over me to get a yet firmer grip upon my throat, the yellow
lamp-light fell across my face. Out of his face, which had now turned
white and haggard, the blood-fury seemed suddenly to die.
"My God!" he gasped. "It's Grant the detective--and I've killed the
wrong man!"
Then there came into his eyes a look which, seeing it again in dreams
even now, years after, makes me awake with a cry, to find the cold
perspiration from my forehead running down into my eyes, my limbs
trembling and my heart leaping like a frightened creature.
"I've got you at last, Grant, have I!" he said, in a voice of cold
and slow and deadly calmness. "Just now--seeing him go in and out of
your house, and, striking in the dark, as I did--I killed a man whom I
believed to be you. But there can be no mistake this time. I've got you
now, and this time"--he took a firmer grip of the knife--"this time, I
rather guess you're going to die."