oing 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 l