“My God! What’s that, Garry!” he burst out. “That thing up there on the hillside!”
He sprang for the steps, Barres after him, taking 386 the ascent at incredible speed, up, up, then out along a shrub-set grassy slope.
“Thessa!” shouted Westmore. “Thessa!”
But the girl was flat on her back on the grass now, fighting sturdily for life—twisting, striking, baffling the whining, panting thing that knelt on her, holding her and trying to drive a knife deep into the lithe young body which always slipped and writhed out of his trembling clutch.
Again and again he tore himself free from her grasp; again and again his armed hand sought to strike, but she always managed to seize and drag it aside with the terrible strength of one dying. And at last, with a last crazed, superhuman effort, she wrested the knife from his unnerved fist, tore it out of his spent fingers.
It fell somewhere near her on the grass; he strove to reach it and pick it up, but already her dauntless resistance began to exhaust him, and he groped for the knife in vain, trying to pin her down with one hand while, with desperate little fists, she rained blows on his bloodless face that dazed him.
But there was still another way—a much better way, in fact. And, as the idea came to him, he ripped the red-silk sash from his breast and, in spite of her struggles, managed to pass it around her bare neck.
“Now!” he panted. “I keep my word at last. C’est fini, ma petite Nihla.”
“Jim! Help me!” she gasped, as Ferez pulled savagely at the silk noose, tightened it with all his strength, knotted it. And in that same second he heard Westmore crashing through the shrubbery, close to him.
Instantly he rose to his knees on the grass; bounded to his feet, leaped over the low shrubs, and was off 387 down the slope—gone like a swift hawk’s shadow on the hillside. Barres was after him.