"It's you again, is it? I thought it was. Don't you make a noise, or I'll choke the life right out of you. You tell me, straight out, what it is you want with me--do you hear?"
As if to drive his question well home, he gave my head a sharp tap against the pavement. His strength must have been prodigious. I was conscious that, with him above me thus and with that iron grasp upon my throat, I was wholly at his mercy. The hour was late. Although almost within a stone's throw of the Strand, the place was solitary; not a creature might pass just where we were the whole night through.
"Take your hand from my windpipe--I cannot speak--you are choking me," I gasped.
"Give me your word you will make no noise if I do. See here!"
He was clutching a knife--as ugly a looking knife as ever I saw. He brandished it before my eyes.
"I give my word," I managed to utter.
He relaxed his hold. It was a comfort to be again able to freely inflate my lungs, though the continued presence of his knee on my chest was none too pleasant. With the point of his knife he actually pricked my nose.
"Don't you try to move, or I will cut your throat as if you were a pig. Lie still and answer my questions--and straight, mind, or you'll be sorry. What is it you want with me?"
"I want nothing from you--I have never wanted anything. You have been under an entire misapprehension throughout."
Once more, with gruesome sportiveness, he tickled my nose with his knife.