n't play any other it seems, I have one
part left in my repertoire.... I can still play the gentleman!"

Deliberately, giving no other warning, he struck from the hand of
Bombiste the black leather box--dashed it far away into the fireplace.
With an inhuman scream the Pole jumped for his throat. They locked. And
the rest was convulsion.

How long it took I cannot tell. Nor yet exactly how it was done. A
darkness seemed to descend about them. They fought as it might have been
through a gap in time and space: I watched them reeling in a dim
immensity. At some point I was aware of a thundering and a hammering
from the outer limits.... At another I had some idiotic impulse to
plunge into the fray myself, to aid my friend. But one glimpse of his
face, caught as a blink through the whirl of things, was quite enough to
throw me back out of that.

Himself, he had no fury. I mean none of the heedlessness of a man merely
berserk. While they revolved in their course together like a many-limbed
polyp, the Pole ravened with ceaseless and bestial ululation. Bibi-Ri
never uttered a sound. Little aid he needed! I swear to you he was still
smiling. He kept on smiling with a set and implacable and dreadful
pleasantry.

And good reason he had to smile, since that was his humor. For just then
by a masterly wrench of wrist over neck he had sent Bombiste's knife
spinning from his grip like a red-winged dragonfly.... Soon afterward I
heard a bone snap.... I had forgotten, you see, that while he might be
the Red Mark he was not called Bibi-Ri for nothing. I had forgotten that
while he might establish his claim to the belated title of a gentleman,
for some twenty-odd years of his life he had been acquiring the
recondite arts of the Parisian apache!

To say the less of it: by those lights he accomplished the job. In the
manner of the voyou and the garroter. In a merciful obscurity. Between
his hands. Between his fingers. With precision and dispatch. He broke
that creature Bombiste the way you would break a bread-straw. Until
their last smashing fall when the Pole was somehow horribly twisted
downward underneath, when his clamor shut off suddenly like a stream at
the tap, when he rolled on the floor an inert bundle.

And we were back in the smoky kitchen....

Voices were crying: figures shifting. The barred door seemed ready to
crack under assault. One fat and snuffy priest had come chattering like
a parrot. One gaunt and iron priest had