“Suzee,” I called to her across her clamour of terrified entreaty, “get a light if you can.”

The hot breath came nearer.

“Devil!  Devil!  This is your promise, your English word.”  The sound came to me like the hiss of steam close to my ear, but I knew the voice of Hop Lee—­Hop Lee buried in Sitka, thousands of miles away.

The arms in my clutch struggled furiously; in their spasm of muscular effort they tore me upwards from the bed, as the lock of my fingers would not give way.

Suzee’s voice clamoured in passionate entreaty, unintelligible to me.  Then suddenly came a terrific twist, which wrenched away one of the arms, and a lightning stab, a deep burning in my shoulder, and simultaneously a blaze of light.  Over me hung the bent old form of Hop Lee, his right arm, lifted up, held a long knife raised for its second stab.  His face was alight with fury.  Scarlet was already running in bright ribands over the whiteness of the bed, Suzee’s blood and my own.  I threw up my left arm and caught his wrist and turned the hand and knife upwards till it pointed to the ceiling, my own arm stretched to the fullest length upright.  Suzee gave one horrible cry of terror, animal terror, and then there was silence beside me.

“She has fainted, has fainted,” my brain muttered in itself.  A sickening fear came into it as silence fell after that one awful cry.

I had my revolver under my pillow.  If I could reach it!  I looked up to the small red eyeballs of the Chinaman.

They were insane, glaring, full of the wild, unreasoning lust to kill.  Some instinct moved me to speak.

“You were dead, I heard.  I never had your wife while you were alive.”

“Liar!  Liar!  You shall pay me in blood.”

His hand with the knife in it twisted itself round in my grip.  I felt my uplifted arm losing its force.  What was draining my strength?  That stream coming softly from my shoulder.

I lifted myself, trying to throw him backwards.  My arm suddenly bent at the elbow and his hand with the knife in it zigzagged downwards very near to my throat.  Age and feebleness had disappeared from him.  He was strong now with the strength of insanity and of that blind leaping fury that glared out of his distorted face.  There was a sudden struggle as he dropped on my chest, then with my hand still locked on his wrist we rolled together onto the floor.

A moment and we were up on our feet and he had forced me backwards to the bed.  I felt my strength was going, but I still clung with a steel-like clutch to his wrist and kept the pointed knife at bay.  As he bent me backwards on to the bed near the pillow, I took my right hand from his arm, snatched the revolver from under the pillow, thrust it into his face between the eyes, and fired.

He fell forwards, a great hole torn in his forehead, from which a river of blood poured, joining the bright ribands and with them making a sea of crimson.