Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/292

 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