Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/55

 to pull himself on top. He was succeeding in this when 'Enery, with a wolfish snarl, sank his teeth in his ears.

“Damn you!” Hector shrieked with rage and pain. “You'll pay for this!”

And, with a great jerk and heave, he freed himself, sending 'Enery crashing into Bill, Bill into the third man, jumped back, and reached in his inside pocket for the ancient blade.

He did it instinctively, unthinkingly. Hitherto, by the token of his English blood and training, by the token of an English gentleman's strange, wonderful, foolish prejudices, he had still been fighting according to the unwritten Anglo-Saxon rules, had still been playing the game, had refused to use fist or elbow or hit below the belt.

Now, suddenly, inside of his brain, something like a colored glass ball burst into a thousand iridescent splinters. His careful English training, his English restraint, his English prejudices, danced away in a mad whirligig of passion, and the blade leaped to his hand like a sentient being, flashed free of the velvet scabbard, caught the haggard rays of the gas jets so that the point of it glittered like a cresset of evil passions.

He used it like a rapier, with carte and tierce, with lunge and thrust and counterthrust and quick, staccato riposte, pinking here a leg, there a grimy hand, and ripping through tough corduroy-as with the edge of a razor.

In and at them, with a stamping of feet, a harsh, guttural cry!