He handed me a slip of blue paper. It was a bill, dated some sixteen years back, promising to pay thirty thousand pounds three months after date. It was signed 'Sherrington.' An endorsement was scrawled across it--'Twickenham.' That endorsement was the little accident which had sent my double to San Francisco.
When I had gathered the purport of the document I looked at Mr. Acrodato. Murder was in his eyes.
'What are you going to give me for it?'
'Your life.'
'You cursed thief?'
I didn't like the words, nor the way in which he said them. There are occasions on which the devil enters into me. That was one.
I was a much smaller man than he, but I have physical strength altogether beyond what the average stranger suspects, and a curious mastery of what we will call certain tricks.
On a sudden I took him by the throat, beneath his beard, and with a twist which I have reason to know almost broke his neck, I jerked him back upon a chair. Driving his head against the back of it, I all but choked the life right out of him. It was only when I felt it slipping through my fingers that I thought it time to stop.
'Mr. Fraser, I'm afraid that one day I shall have to kill you. I've a mind to do it now; only it would be difficult to explain your corpse.'
I never saw a man cut a more ludicrous figure. The pain he had had to bear was no small thing. I shouldn't be surprised if for days his neck was conscious of the twist I had given it. But his amazement eclipsed his suffering. Not until that moment had he realised what a change had taken place in his lordship's character, and in his lordship's methods. For some seconds he gasped for breath--as was only natural. When he shambled to his feet he shrank from me like some panic-stricken, half-witted fool. While he was still staring at me, as if I had been some uncanny thing, the door opened and Mr. Smith came in.