ve played a pretty game with you, you
dirty English dog! I've watched you squirming and writhing whilst the
stupid German told you his pretty little tale and plied you with his
wine and his cigars. You're in our power now, you miserable English
hound! Do you understand that? Now call on your fleet to come and save
you!

"Listen! I'll be frank with you to the last. I've had my suspicions of
you from the first, when they telephoned me that you had escaped from
the hotel, but I wanted to make _sure_. Ever since you have been in this
room it has been in my power to push that bell there and send you to
Spandau, where they rid us of such dirty dogs as you.

"But the game amused me. I liked to see the Herr Englander playing the
spy against _me_, the master of them all. Do you know, you fool, that
old Schratt knows English, that she spent years of her harlot's life in
London, and that when you allowed her a glimpse of that passport, your
own passport, the one you so cleverly burned, she remembered the name?
Ah! you didn't know that, did you?

"Shall I tell you what was in that telegram they just brought me? It was
from Schratt, our faithful Schratt, who shall have a bangle for this
night's work, to say that the corpse at the hotel has a chain round its
neck with an identity disc in the name of Semlin. Ha! you didn't know
that either, did you?

"And _you_ would bargain and chaffer with me! _You_ would dictate your
terms, you scum! _You_ with your head in a noose, a spy that has failed
in his mission, a miserable wretch that I can send to his death with a
flip of my little finger! You impudent hound! Well, you'll get your
deserts this time, Captain Desmond Okewood ... but I'll have that paper
first!"

Roaring "Give it to me!" he rushed at me like some frenzied beast of the
jungle. The veins stood out at his temples, his hairy nostrils opened
and closed as his breath came faster, his long arms shot out and his
great paws clutched at my throat.

But I was waiting for him. As he came at me, I heard his clubfoot stump
once on the polished floor, then, from the radiator behind me, I raised
high in my arms the heavy marble slab, and with every ounce of strength
in my body brought it crashing down on his head.

He fell like a log, the blood oozing sluggishly from his head on to the
parquet. I stopped an instant, snatched the cigar-case from the pocket
where he had placed it, extracted the document and fled from the room.