"My friend," said Gavin, soundlessly, "if a girl like Claire Standish was waiting for me, beyond, that shaft of light, I'd make the trip in something better than no time at all. But then—she's not my sister, thank the good Lord!"
He grinned at his own silly thoughts concerning the girl he had talked to for so brief a time. Yet he found himself looking at her elder brother with a certain reluctant friendliness, on her account.
Suddenly, the grin was wiped from his face, and he was tense from head to foot.
Standish, on his way homeward, was strolling past a clump of dwarf shrubbery. And, idly watching him, Gavin could have sworn that one end of the shrubbery moved.
Then, he was no longer in doubt. The bit of darkness detached itself from the rest of the shrubbery, as Milo lounged past, and it sprang, catlike, at the unsuspecting man's back.
Into the path of light it leaped. In the same atom of time, Gavin Brice shouted aloud in sharp warning, and dashed forward, the collie at his side.
But he was fifty feet away. And his shout served only to make
Standish halt, staring about him.
It was then that the creature from the shrubbery made his spring. He struck venomously at Standish, from behind. And Gavin could see, in the striking hand, a glitter of steel.
Standish—warned perhaps by sound, perhaps by instinct—wheeled half-way around. Thus the knifeblow missed its mark between his shoulder-blades. Not the blade, but the fist which gripped it, smote full on Standish's shoulder. The deflected point merely shore the white coat from neck to waist.
There was no scope to strike again. And the assailant contented himself with passing his free arm garrotingly around Standish's neck, from behind, and leaping upward, bringing his knees into the small of the victim's back.