The Bittermeads Mystery | Page 7

seemed all the
more intense now that those regular and heavy footsteps had ceased.
"Jolly queer, as queer a thing as ever I came across," he muttered again.
He listened and heard a faint sound from his right. He listened again
and thought he heard a rustling on his left, but was not sure and all at
once a great figure loomed up gigantic before him and the light of
lantern gleamed in his face.
"Now, my man," a voice said, "you've been following me ever since I
left Bittermeads, and I'm going to give you a lesson you won't forget in
a hurry."
Dunn stood quite still. At the moment his chief feeling was one of
intense discomfiture at the way in which he had been outwitted, and he
experienced, too, a very keen and genuine admiration for the woodcraft
the other had shown.
Evidently, all the time he had known, or at any rate, suspected, that he

was being followed, and choosing this as a favourable spot he had
quietly doubled on his tracks, come up behind his pursuer, and taken
him unawares.
Dunn had not supposed there was a man in England who could have
played such a trick on him, but his admiration was roughly disturbed
before he could express it, for the grasp upon his collar tightened and
upon his shoulders there alighted a tremendous, stinging blow, as with
all his very considerable strength, the big man brought down his
walking-stick with a resounding thwack.
The sheer surprise of it, the sudden sharp pain, jerked a quick cry from
Dunn, who had not been in the least prepared for such an attack, and in
the darkness had not seen the stick rise, and the other laughed grimly.
"Yes, you scoundrel," he said. "I know very well who you are and what
you want, and I'm going to thrash you within an inch of your life."
Again the stick rose in the air, but did not fall, for round about his body
Dunn laid such a grip as he had never felt before and as would for
certain have crushed in the ribs of a weaker man. The lantern crashed to
the ground, they were in darkness.
"Ha! Would you?" the man exclaimed, taken by surprise in his turn,
and, giant as he was, he felt himself plucked up from the ground as you
pluck a weed from a lawn and held for a moment in mid-air and then
dashed down again.
Perhaps not another man alive could have kept his footing under such
treatment, but, somehow, he managed to, though it needed all his great
strength to resist the shock.
He flung away his walking-stick, for he realized very clearly now that
this was not going to be, as he had anticipated, a mere case of the
administration of a deserved punishment, but rather the starkest,
fiercest fight that ever he had known.
He grappled with his enemy, trying to make the most of his superior

height and weight, but the long arms twined about him, seemed to press
the very breath from his body and for all the huge efforts he put forth
with every ounce of his tremendous strength behind them, he could not
break loose from the no less tremendous grip wherein he was taken.
Breast to breast they fought, straining, swaying a little this way or that,
but neither yielding an inch. Their muscles stood out like bars of steel,
their breath came heavily, neither man was conscious any more of
anything save his need to conquer and win and overthrow his enemy.
The quick passion of hot rage that had come upon Dunn when he felt
the other's unexpected blow still burned and flamed intensely, so that
he no longer remembered even the strange and high purpose which had
brought him here.
His adversary, too, had lost all consciousness of all other things in the
lust of this fierce physical battle, and when he gave presently a loud,
half-strangled shout, it was not fear that he uttered or a cry for aid, but
solely for joy in such wild struggle and efforts as he had never known
before.
And Dunn spake no word and uttered no sound, but strove all the more
with all the strength of every nerve and muscle he possessed once again
to pluck the other up that he might dash him down a second time.
In quick and heavy gasps came their breaths as they still swayed and
struggled together, and though each exerted to the utmost a strength
few could have withstood, each found that in the other he seemed to
have met his match.
In vain Dunn tried again to lift his adversary up so that he might hurl
him to the ground. It was an