Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/188

, even before he could descend his wing of the stairway, he saw the figure in the cherry-coloured dressing-gown catapult down the wing that led from the opposite side of the wide hallway. He knew then that it was no longer a time for hesitation. Throwing off his coat, he took the stairs at a bound.

They seemed to come together, those four contending figures, as though drawn to one spot by a magnet. They came together on that landing like kernels thrown into a hopper, like contending acids poured into a test-tube.

Kestner was conscious only of the fact that he and the startlingly robust figure with the cherubic face had come together, had locked arms and legs and were engaged in an Adamitic struggle for supremacy. He knew, in a vague way, that the other struggling couple were involved with them, that a third hand was clawing at his face and hair, that a power which he found it hard to resist was straining itself to force him back and roll him down the wide stairway to the floor below. He scarcely knew, as he fought for anchorage, that he had caught at the clock-base. There was no mental registration of the fact that a rustling figure had slipped down to the landing, switched out the light, and groped her way onward down through the darkness to the street. He had a vague memory of the huge clock coming over, and bringing with it the two suits of factory-made armour. There was the crash of glass, the release of weights and springs, the tumult of contending plates of steel, an intermingling clangour of brass and chains and splintering wood and shouting throats as the great clock and the suits of rattling steel and