head and his eyes all but drop from
their sockets.

[Illustration: The cruel fingers press with deadly force.]

The moon swims round in a sea of blood--he gasps, gargles, struggles.

The savage man in whose clutches he suddenly finds himself seems
glorying in his power.

Quinton feels himself face to face with death: he is a child in the
hands of this dark highwayman.

The thought rises suddenly to his fading senses:

"By night an Atheist half believes in God."

The terror of judgment is upon him--hell threatens. Through the black
slits of the mask he faintly discerns the eyes of his tormentor, whose
face is in such close proximity to his own that the hot breath of
passion brushes his brow. They are the eyes of a devil, burning as
coals of fire--glowing, scintillating. The broad white teeth of the
man glisten as they press his lower lip; then he loosens his hold on
Quinton's throat and gropes for his hand.

The two are fighting now like twin devils under the dark trees, through
which the moonlight flits. They roll over in the dust, while Quinton
breathes out curses, struggling for mastery. More than once he feels
one finger of his left hand caught in the stranger's grasp, then, as
with a cry of triumph which rends the air with hideous mirth,
super-human strength seems to possess the masked man. He picks up
Quinton in his sinewy arms, whirls him once wildly above his head, and
drops him over a rock, down a bank--a fall of only a few feet, on to
thick undergrowth below. Then leaping back into his saddle, he gallops
at full speed towards the jungle, while Quinton lies gasping and
shaking, cut and bleeding.

He rises dizzily--strange!--there are no bones broken, only the
uncomfortable feeling of those hot fingers at his throat, and the giddy
sensation from the violent shaking. He feels for his watch; it is
still there. Some money fallen from his pocket lies loose on the
wayside. Nothing apparently is stolen.

Then he looks down suddenly at his finger, the one twice captured in
their struggle.

His cat's-eye ring has gone!

CHAPTER XVII.

"WHERE THERE AIN'T NO TEN COMMANDMENTS."
"_The Road to Mandalay._"--_Rudyard Kipling_.

As Carol goes on through the night, fear is in his heart.

How easily the dark, vindictive, savage creature could have cast him
wantonly into eternity, yet he stayed his hand. Evidently he had not
desired Quinton's life, since he took nothing but a little band of
g