“I shall stay with you,” was the police-officer’s defiant reply, as, with a sudden movement, he grabbed my left wrist in an endeavour to wrest the weapon from my grasp. Next second I had stopped the car, pressed down the brake, and thus had both my hands free.
In a moment the struggle became desperate. He fought for his life, for he saw that, now he had defied me, I meant what I threatened. No doubt he was physically stronger than myself, and at first he had the advantage; but not for long, because, resorting to a ruse taught me long ago by a man who was a professional wrestler at the music-halls, I succeeded in turning the muzzle of the weapon into his face.
If I had liked, I could have pulled the trigger and blown half his head away. Yet, although I had become the accomplice of a daring gang of jewel-thieves, and though one of them had given me the weapon to use in case of need, I had neither desire nor intention of becoming a murderer.
For fully six or seven minutes we were locked in deadly embrace. Upton, time after time, tried to turn the weapon upon me, and so compel me to give it up under threats of death. In this, however, he was unsuccessful, though more than once he showered at me fierce imprecations.
He had his thin, sinewy hands in my collar, and was pressing his bony knuckles into my throat, until I was half throttled, when, of a sudden, by dint of an effort of which I had never believed myself capable, I gave his arm a twist which nearly dislocated his shoulder and forced him to release his hold. I still had the revolver tightly clenched in my right hand, for I had now succeeded in changing it from my left, and at last slipped it back into my hip-pocket, leaving both hands free. Then, in our desperate struggle, he tried to force me backwards over the steering-wheel, and would have done so had I not been able to trip him unexpectedly. In a second I had flung my whole weight upon him and sent him clutching at the air over the splashboard, and so across the “bonnet” to the ground.
In a moment I restarted the car, but not before he had risen and remounted upon the step.
“You shan’t get away!” he cried. “Even if you leave me here you’ll be arrested by the German police before night. They already have your description.”
“Enough!” I cried savagely, again whipping out my weapon. “Get down—or I’ll shoot!”
“Shoot, then!” he shouted defiantly.
“Take that instead!” I replied, and, with the butt-end of the weapon, I struck him full between the eyes, causing him to fall back into the road, where he lay like a log.