“Quite suddenly his efforts ceased and I heard him shuffle away.  I returned to the other door, but he made no fresh attempt on it.  I listened, and hearing no sound, bethought me of the open door of the museum.  Probably he had gone there to look for a way out.  This would never do.  The plate I cared not a fig for, but the museum specimens were a different matter; and he might damage them from sheer malice.

“I unbolted the door, entered and shut it again, locking it on the inside and dropping the key into my pocket.  I had just done so when he appeared at the museum door, eyeing me warily and unobtrusively slipping a knuckle-duster on his left hand.  I had noted that he was not left-handed and drew my own conclusions as to what he meant to do with his right.  We stood for some seconds facing each other and then he began to edge towards the door.  I drew aside to let him pass and he ran to the door and turned the handle.  When he found the door locked he was furious.  He advanced threateningly with his left hand clenched, but then drew back.  Apparently, my smiling exterior, coupled with my previous conduct, daunted him.  I think he took me for a lunatic; in fact, he hinted as much in coarse, ill-chosen terms.  But his vocabulary was very limited, though quaint.

“We exchanged a few remarks and I could see that he did not like the tone of mine.  The fact is that the sight of the knuckle-duster had changed my mood.  I no longer felt playful.  He had recalled me to my original purpose.  He expressed a wish to leave the house and to know ‘what my game was.’  I replied that he was my game and that I believed that I had bagged him, whereupon he rushed at me and aimed a vicious blow at my head with his armed left fist, which, if it had come home, would have stretched me senseless.  But it did not.  I guarded it easily and countered him so that he staggered back gasping.

“That made him furious.  He came at me like a wild beast, with his mouth open and his armed fist flourished aloft as if he would annihilate me.  I tried to deal with him by the methods of Mr. Slimy Cohen, but it was useless.  He was no boxer and he had a knuckle-duster.  Consequently we grabbed one another like a pair of monkeys and sought to inflict unorthodox injuries.  He struggled and writhed and growled and kicked and even tried to bite; while I kept, as far as I could, control of his wrists and waited my opportunity.  It was a most undignified affair.  We staggered to and fro, clawing at one another; we gyrated round the room in a wild, unseemly waltz; we knocked over the chairs, we bumped against the table, we banged each other’s heads against the walls; and all the time, as my adversary growled and showed his teeth like a savage dog, I was sensible of a strange feeling of physical enjoyment such as one might experience in some strenuous game.  I seemed to have acquired a new and unfamiliar personality.