"Where in blue blazes have you been?" he demanded. "D'you think I like wrestling with wildcats?"
I looked him over. "Didn't make out so well, did you? Lucky he wasn't any bigger, or I would have had to help you. Why pick on a little guy like that? What's he done that you don't like?"
He pointed. Light from the reception hall fell through the bushes in irregular patches. In one of them, half buried in the scuffed-up dirt, I caught the glint of polished metal.
"Pick it up," Bill said.
It was a gun, bigger than the largest six-shooter ever toted by a Hollywood buckaroo. It had a massive stock and the thickest barrel I had ever seen. The whole look of the thing was crazy, like something out of another world.
Bill had been scrambling around in the dirt. I saw that blood was oozing from a gash in his neck. Before I could speak he held up a piece of gleaming metal.
"Take a look at that," he said grimly. "That's what he wanted to pump into the Ambassador. Only I got it instead—in the neck. Now will you give me a hand with this he-cat before he comes to and starts trying to skin me alive?"
I took the thing. It was a steel bolt or arrow of the kind once used in cross-bows, sharpened to a needle point with six razor-edged vanes running back to the hilt. I slipped it into the chubby muzzle of the gun. It was a perfect fit.
"That," Bill told me, "is a solenoid-gun—one that works. You've seen a metal core pop out of an electric coil when the juice is snapped on. It's a common laboratory stunt. Well, it's grown up and had pups, and this is one of the nastiest of them. No noise at all—and does that dart travel! It would go through a man like cheese even if he's as thick as His Magnificence yonder."
Through the open doors of the reception hall I could see the broad Teutonic back of Herr Wilhelm Friedrich Nebel, Ambassador from the newly stabilized Middle-European Confederacy. Half the stuffed shirts in Washington were crowded around him, trying to make themselves heard over the blare of the band and I recognized three of the President's own private bodyguards. I knew that there were Secret Service men posted all over the grounds to forestall this very thing, yet in spite of them this little man with the outlandish gun had crept within fifty feet of his goal. Had he picked them off, one by one, with his silent darts?