it was blood.

"Suzee," I called to her across her clamour of terrified entreaty,
"get a light if you can."

The hot breath came nearer.

"Devil! Devil! This is your promise, your English word." The sound
came to me like the hiss of steam close to my ear, but I knew the
voice of Hop Lee--Hop Lee buried in Sitka, thousands of miles away.

The arms in my clutch struggled furiously; in their spasm of muscular
effort they tore me upwards from the bed, as the lock of my fingers
would not give way.

Suzee's voice clamoured in passionate entreaty, unintelligible to me.
Then suddenly came a terrific twist, which wrenched away one of the
arms, and a lightning stab, a deep burning in my shoulder, and
simultaneously a blaze of light. Over me hung the bent old form of Hop
Lee, his right arm, lifted up, held a long knife raised for its second
stab. His face was alight with fury. Scarlet was already running in
bright ribands over the whiteness of the bed, Suzee's blood and my
own. I threw up my left arm and caught his wrist and turned the hand
and knife upwards till it pointed to the ceiling, my own arm stretched
to the fullest length upright. Suzee gave one horrible cry of terror,
animal terror, and then there was silence beside me.

"She has fainted, has fainted," my brain muttered in itself. A
sickening fear came into it as silence fell after that one awful cry.

I had my revolver under my pillow. If I could reach it! I looked up to
the small red eyeballs of the Chinaman.

They were insane, glaring, full of the wild, unreasoning lust to kill.
Some instinct moved me to speak.

"You were dead, I heard. I never had your wife while you were alive."

"Liar! Liar! You shall pay me in blood."

His hand with the knife in it twisted itself round in my grip. I felt
my uplifted arm losing its force. What was draining my strength? That
stream coming softly from my shoulder.

I lifted myself, trying to throw him backwards. My arm suddenly bent
at the elbow and his hand with the knife in it zigzagged downwards
very near to my throat. Age and feebleness had disappeared from him.
He was strong now with the strength of insanity and of that blind
leaping fury that glared out of his distorted face. There was a sudden
struggle as he dropped on my chest, then with my hand still locked on
his wrist we rolled together onto the floor.

A moment and we were up on our feet and he had forced me backwards to
the bed. I felt my strength was g