Yelling horribly with the pain, and with his countenance bathed in blood, Vitriol Bob once more got his foe beneath him; and the Doctor echoed those appalling cries of agony as he felt the fore-finger of his adversary’s left hand thrust into one of his eyes. Frightful—terrific—revolting was the contest at this crisis,—the two miscreants writhing, struggling, convulsing like snakes in each other’s grasp,—and the ferocious process of gouging inflicting the agonies of hell upon the maddened Jack Rily.
’Twas done: the eye was literally torn out of its socket; but the pain excited the Doctor to the most tremendous efforts in order to wreak a deadly vengeance upon his foe. And as they rolled over on the blood-stained sward, Rily’s hand came in contact with the knife which he had ere now lost; and clutching it with a savage yell of triumph, he plunged it into Vitriol Bob’s throat.
The miscreant, mortally wounded, rolled over on the grass with a gurgling sound coming from between his lips; and Jack Rily was immediately upon him, brandishing the fatal weapon.
Then, at that moment, as the moon-light fell fully upon the countenance of Vitriol Bob, as he gazed up at his victorious enemy, what fiendish hate—what impotent rage—what diabolical malignity were depicted upon those distorted features and expressed in every lineament of that blood-smeared face,—a face rendered the more frightful by the loss of the nose.
“Who will return to London this morning, Bob?” demanded Jack Rily, scarcely able to articulate, so parched was his throat—so agonising was the pain in the socket whence the eye had been torn out. “Ah! you can’t answer—but you know well enough what the reply should be!”
Vitriol Bob made a sudden and desperate effort to throw his enemy off him: but he was easily overpowered—and in another moment the Doctor drove the sharp blade of the knife through the man’s right eye, deep into the brain.
So strong was the convulsive spasm which shot through the form of Vitriol Bob, that the Doctor was hurled completely off him: but all danger of a renewal of the contest was past—Jack Rily’s enemy was no more!
The conqueror lay for some minutes upon the sward, so exhausted that it almost seemed possible to give up the ghost at a gasp: it appeared, in fact, as if he retained a spark of life within himself by his own free will—but that were he to breathe even too hard, existence would become extinct that moment.
A sensation of numbness came over him, deadening the pain which his eyeless socket occasioned him; and for nearly ten minutes a sort of dreamy repose stole upon the man, the incidents of the night becoming confused and all his ideas jumbling together pell-mell.
But suddenly—swift as the lightning darts forth from the thunder-cloud upon the obscurity of a stormy sky—a feeling of all that had happened and where he was sprang up in the Doctor’s soul; and half rising from his recumbent posture, he gazed wildly around with the visual organ that was still left.