I tightened my grip upon his throat, digging my fingers into his windpipe, until I felt the life ebbing out of him in a steady flow. My own strength was almost gone, but the primitive desire to kill kept me clinging there tenaciously.
At last he began to weaken. In his death throes he lurched about in a circle—until his foot slipped through a man-hole above one of the ladders, and he fell across the rail with a choking moan. With me hanging upon his back he began to slip outward and downward, inch by inch.
I knew the end had come. He was falling—and I was falling with him. But thoughts of my own death were smothered in a wild rejoicing. I had conquered this yellow fiend! Everything grew blurred before my eyes as we sagged toward the final plunge into the gorge.
Suddenly my ankles were seized in a stout grip, and I felt myself being dragged back from the sickening void. With this, I loosened my hold upon the Chinaman’s throat, and his body went hurtling past me to its doom.
Another instant and I was off the rocking bridge, upon solid ground, and Dr. Ferdinand Gresham was shaking me in an effort to restore my senses.
He had recovered from his own fainting spell just in time to save me from being dragged over the cliff.
Swiftly I drew myself together. The weird twilight was deepening. But a few feet away I beheld Ensign Hallock busy at the mortars and mines, preparing to touch them off.
He motioned to us to run. We did so. In a moment his work was finished and he took after us.
Back along the ridge we fled, away from the danger of the coming blast.
A couple of hundred yards distant, and about fifty feet below us, a bare promontory jutted out from the hillside, affording an unobstructed view of the whole region—the crumbling mountains upon the horizon, the power plant at the base of the cliff, and the bare space behind us where the mines were about to end the career of the sorcerers’ workshop.