The Hand of Peril/Part 5/Chapter 9
IX
Kestner knew what the sound of that falling body meant. He groped his way forward in a sudden panic of apprehension. He ran back and forth in the open spaces, searching for the spot where that other man must surely have gone down.
Then he stopped short and crouched back, listening, warned by some whispering sixth sense, remembering that Lambert had long since proved himself a master of trickery. He stood there, pondering if that fall might not be the pretence of a wily enemy to gain time enough to reload a revolver, or at least drag himself silently off to more sheltered quarters. But he could be sure of nothing.
Kestner decided it was too late to take chances. That echoing tumult would only too quickly bring outside interference. And he wanted nothing to come between him and his quarry. Lambert belonged to him. He was there to make his capture, and he did not intend to be cheated out of his prisoner.
Then he stopped short, astounded by his own stupidity, his own absence of resource. Here he was groping about in utter darkness from sheer force of habit, when he had matches in his own pocket. There was no longer need for secrecy. What he wanted now was light. What he had to have was light.
He felt in his pocket for a match, made sure of the dipped end, and struck it. Just what happened after that Kestner never quite knew.
He remembered seeing the sudden spurt of the flame. Then he was conscious of shock, as though that flame had been struck in the midst of an explosive gas and he had stood facing the resultant detonation.
That shock carried him backward, flinging the revolver from his hand, jolting the very breath out of his body. He was sprawling and scrambling and threshing about the wharf-floor before he fully realised the meaning of that onslaught. Lambert, after all, had tricked him.
His enemy had feinted and snatched at a pretence of being shot. Under cover of that feint he had gathered himself together and waited for the first sign of Kestner's position. Then he had leaped for him out of the darkness. He had closed in on him, with the antediluvian fury of a cave-man cornered in his cave. He had resolved to make that ultimate struggle a struggle of fang and nail and fist. And now they were on the wharf-floor, locked together in the darkness, with quick gasps and grunts from each straining and contending body.
Lambert was the bulkier man of the two, Kestner remembered, and in some ways much the stronger man. But Kestner had the advantage of youth. And there were certain things the lighter-bodied man had learned in his earliest days in the Service. He had long since mastered the rudimentary jiu-jitsu tricks of a vocation where, in contests, manual force was invariably the final arbiter. His police-rooky training had also included something more than morning pistol-practice and "strong-arm" artifices and first aid to the injured. It had taught him the use of the "arm-twist" and the "hip-throw," of the "neck-hold" for breaking a rear attack clutch, of the "leg-lock" for pinning down a prisoner so that a captor's hands could be free. He had also mastered that most efficacious expedient of thumb-pressure on the nose, that torturing pressure, on the thin and membranous bones, which could so promptly break a waist-hold, not only by engendering a pain that soon became unendurable but also by compressing an air-passage that was essential to life.
That was the trick which Kestner thought of as he felt Lambert's bear-like pressure about his constricted waist. That was the trick on which he hung his hopes, remembering that his hip-wound, however slight, might still leave him weak from loss of blood. It was not time, he inwardly repeated, for half-measures.
He even lost ground a little as he shifted his right arm, but this did not cause him to lose hope. Once his hand was free, even as the struggle along the rough boards continued, he fought to gain that lean and bony face. He clutched it savagely, as a collie's jaw clamps on a chicken bone. He felt for the nose, placed his thumb, locked his fingers, and applied the pressure.
He knew as he did so, that it was then merely a matter of time. Lambert fought with fresh fire, knowing that clutch had to be broken, and broken soon. But Kestner hung on like a leech. The great body under him lurched and tossed and heaved. Together they rolled over and over. Then they went bodily against a wall of high-piled lemon-crates. That tottering pillar of uneven units swayed outward, imparted its unsteadiness to other columns, and then came tumbling down in an ever-increasing avalanche of bales, half-burying the two figures under their weight, adding to the clamour and noise and confusion at the core of which those two madly threshing bodies still contended.
Not once did Kestner loosen his clutch. Not once did he give up. Not once did he relieve that cruel pressure. He knew that this movement was final, that with it he must lose or win, for all time. And he had suffered certain indignities, in the past, which did not leave him over-tender of heart. It was a fight to a finish; and this was the finish.