I snatched up the weapon and dropped by my brother’s side, crushing Clubfoot’s right arm to the ground.  I thrust the pistol in his face.

“Stop that noise!” I commanded.

The German obeyed.

“Better search him, Francis,” I said to my brother.  “He probably has a Browning on him somewhere.”

Francis went through the man’s pockets, reaching up and putting each article as it came to light on the desk above him.  From an inner breast pocket he extracted the Browning.  He glanced at it:  the magazine was full with a cartridge in the breech.

“Hadn’t we better truss him up?” Francis said to me.

“No,” I said.  I was still kneeling on the German’s arm.  He seemed exhausted.  His head had fallen back upon the ground.

“Let me up, curse you!” he choked.

“No!” I said again and Francis turned and looked at me.

Each of us knew what was in the other’s mind, my brother and I. We were thinking of a hand-clasp we had exchanged on the banks of the Rhine.

I was about to speak but Francis checked me.  He was trembling all over.  I could feel his elbow quiver where it touched mine.

“No, Des, please ...” he pleaded, “let me ... this is my show....”

Then, in a voice that vibrated with suppressed passion, he spoke swiftly to Clubfoot.

“Take a good look at me, Grundt,” he said sternly.  “You don’t know me, do you?  I am Francis Okewood, brother of the man who has brought you to your fall.  You don’t know me, but you knew some of my friends, I think.  Jack Tracy?  Do you remember him?  And Herbert Arbuthnot?  Ah, you knew him, too.  And Philip Brewster?  You remember him as well, do you?  No need to ask you what happened to poor Philip!”

The man on the floor answered nothing, but I saw the colour very slowly fade from his cheeks.

My brother spoke again.

“There were four of us after that letter, as you knew, Grundt, and three of us are dead.  But you never got me.  I was the fourth man, the unknown quantity in all your elaborate calculations ... and it seems to me I spoiled your reckoning ...  I and this brother of mine ... an amateur at the game, Grundt!”

Still Clubfoot was silent, but I noticed a bead of perspiration tremble on his forehead, then trickle down his ashen cheeks and drop splashing to the floor.

Francis continued in the same deep, relentless voice.

“I never thought I should have to soil my hands by ridding the world of a man like you, Grundt, but it has come to it and you have to die.  I’d have killed you in hot blood when I first came in but for Jack and Herbert and the others ... for their sake you had to know who is your executioner.”

My brother raised the pistol.  As he did so the man on the floor, by a tremendous effort of strength, rose erect to his knees, flinging me headlong.  Then there was a hot burst of flame close to my cheek as I lay on the floor, a deafening report, a thud and a sickening gurgle.