describe. But the
fighting man had some fight in him still; and scarcely had I grasped
the situation when he hit out venomously behind with the bottle, which
was smashed to bits on Raffles's shin. Then I threw my strength into
the scale; and before many minutes we had our officer gagged and bound
in his chair. But it was not one of our bloodless victories. Raffles
had been cut to the bone by the broken glass; his leg bled wherever he
limped; and the fierce eyes of the bound man followed the wet trail
with gleams of sinister satisfaction.

I thought I had never seen a man better bound or better gagged. But
the humanity seemed to have run out of Raffles with his blood. He tore
up tablecloths, he cut down blind-cords, he brought the dust-sheets
from the drawing-room, and multiplied every bond. The unfortunate
man's legs were lashed to the legs of his chair, his arms to its arms,
his thighs and back fairly welded to the leather. Either end of his own
ruler protruded from his bulging cheeks--the middle was hidden by his
moustache--and the gag kept in place by remorseless lashings at the
back of his head. It was a spectacle I could not bear to contemplate
at length, while from the first I found myself physically unable to
face the ferocious gaze of those implacable eyes. But Raffles only
laughed at my squeamishness, and flung a dust-sheet over man and chair;
and the stark outline drove me from the room.

It was Raffles at his worst, Raffles as I never knew him before or
after--a Raffles mad with pain and rage, and desperate as any other
criminal in the land. Yet he had struck no brutal blow, he had uttered
no disgraceful taunt, and probably not inflicted a tithe of the pain he
had himself to bear. It is true that he was flagrantly in the wrong,
his victim as laudably in the right. Nevertheless, granting the
original sin of the situation, and given this unforeseen development,
even I failed to see how Raffles could have combined greater humanity
with any regard for our joint safety; and had his barbarities ended
here, I for one should not have considered them an extraordinary
aggravation of an otherwise minor offence. But in the broad daylight
of the bathroom, which had a ground-glass window but no blind, I saw at
once the serious nature of his wound and of its effect upon the man.

"It will maim me for a month," said he; "and if the V.C. comes out
alive, the wound he gave may be identified with the wound I've go