Part 33 (2/2)

Oh, it was fine hunting!

d.a.m.n him! He snapped himself into one of the little lifts when I was within six yards of him. I saw his ugly face sink out of sight behind the gla.s.s panels. I remembered that these small hydraulic lifts worked, though the big ones below didn't. But I remembered something else ...

there was a stairway.

I found it by instinct, a great broad stair with tiled walls like the subway of some railway terminus.

I didn't bother about the stairs. I leapt down--preserving my balance by a miracle--six or seven at a time. Pounding out into the great empty City at the foot, I swirled round and was just in time to see my gentleman bolt out of his lift like a rabbit from its hole and run to where I knew was the outside stairway which fell, in its corkscrew path, barred by many gates, right down to safety and the normal world.

It was the way by which dear old Pu-Yi had hoped to descend and raise the alarm. It was the perilous eyrie upon which this same bull-like a.s.sa.s.sin had picked him off like a sitting pigeon and boasted of it not half an hour before.

As he dodged and ran I fired at him, but never a bullet touched the brute and I flung the Colt away with an oath.

”Much better kill him with my own hands,” I said in my mind, ”much better tear his head off, break him up--”

I tell you this as it happened. For the moment I was a wild beast, in pursuit of another, but still, I think, a super-beast.

Well, never mind that. I saw him fumbling at a sort of fence, clearly outlined against an immense s.p.a.ce of morning sky, and thundered after him--thundered, I say, because I was now running along an open steel grating, which seemed to sway....

Then I vaulted over where Zorilla had vaulted, and my heart leapt into my mouth as I fell--fell some eight feet on to a tiny platform, protected from s.p.a.ce by a rail not more than three feet high.

I reeled, and caught hold of a stanchion and saved myself. Far, far below, London--London in color was unrolling itself like a map--and immediately below my feet, already a considerable distance down, was the slithering black spider that I had sworn to kill.

I could see him through the grid, and then I flung myself upon the corkscrew ladder, grasping the rails with my hands until the skin was burnt from them, disdaining the steps and spinning round and ever downwards like a great top.

As I went my head projected at right angles to my body. As I buzzed down that sickening height I saw that Zorilla had stopped. I knew that he had come to one of the steel gates, at which he was fumbling uselessly.

Then, as I came to the last step before the little gate platform I saw also, under the curve of the stair, a huddled figure, and I knew who _that_ was, who that had been....

I threw myself at Zorilla with my knee in the small of his back.

Instantly I caught him round the throat with my fingers just on the big veins behind the ear which supply the brain with blood, and my fingers crushed the trachea until the whole supple throat seemed breaking under the molding of my grip.

I felt that I had got him. That if I could hold out for a minute he would be dead, but I hadn't reckoned with the immense muscular force of the body.

I clung like the leopard on the buffalo, but he began to sway this way and that. In front of us was the steel gate and the motionless figure of Pu-Yi. We were struggling upon the steel grid, not much larger than a tea table. A slight rail only three feet high defended us from the void--a little thigh-high rail between us and a drop of near two thousand feet.

He lurched to the left, and I swung out into immensity, carried on his back. I was sure it was the end, that I should be flung off into s.p.a.ce, when with one arm he gripped the gate, braced all his great strength and slowly dragged us back into equilibrium. It seemed that the whole tower trembled, vibrated in a horrible, metallic music.

I pressed down my thumbs, I strained every sinew of my wrist and arm in the strangle hold, and I felt the life pulsing out of him in steady throbs. There was nothing else in the world now but myself and him and I ground my teeth and clutched harder.

In his death agony he lurched to the other side of our tiny foothold s.p.a.ce. This was where the circular stairway ended. He caught his foot, so I was told afterwards, in the last stanchion of the stair, fell over the rail with a low, sobbing groan, and then, weighted by me upon his shoulders, began to slip, slip, slip, downwards.

And I with him.

I had conquered. I don't think that in that moment I had any feeling but one of wild, fierce joy. He was going, I was going with him, but I never thought of that, until my right ankle was clutched in a vice-like grip.

I felt the warm, heaving body below me rush away, tearing my grip from its throat by its own dreadful impetus, and then, as I was s.n.a.t.c.hed back with a jar of every bone in my body, there was a shrill whistling of air for a second as Zorilla went headlong to his doom, and I knew nothing else.

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