The escapee saw in the twilight a stout figure mounted upon an empty soap-box.
This figure held in one hand a jug. As the hand moved in response to the man’s words, a dark liquid, looking like blood, splashed from the jug. It was the blood of Holterman’s vines.
Holterman was holding forth to an imaginary audience on the corrupt state of the Government.
The speech was given in English and German. A marvellous speech, full of strange thoughts, but lost for lack of an audience.
Excepting an opossum, which came down the chimney, and sat gravely on the kitchen mantlepiece, opposite the wine-room door each evening, Hans the orator was usually without listeners.
While he babbled, Jean Petit—eye and ear alternately to the crack in the slabs—listened attentively. It was weeks since he had heard the speech of man,[123] and the sounds seemed to throw him into a grim reverie.
The speech within the hut was strangely like the last talk of the men who had been with him in the boat.
Petit, wise in experience, smiled fiendishly as he realised how matters stood with the man inside. The lower stars began to appear like live diamonds set in the dark leaves of the gums. The skeletons of ring-barked trees stood up in spectral silence against a background of darkened sky.
Hans talked on and on. Much of his madness was about his treasure, the money he had hidden in the tea tin in the kitchen chimney.
At last Petit drew his knife from its sheath, and looked at the edge in the starlight. Then he slipped off his shoes and began to creep stealthily round to the kitchen door. When the man in the wine-room stopped to take breath or to refresh himself, Petit would stop also, his eye to a crack in the wall. His breath came and went noiselessly like an animal of the bush. He created no more disturbance than a panther creeping through the forest on the trail of a prey.
The door creaked a little, but Holterman took no notice. A dark figure skulked across the doorway, and, hidden in the cover of the wall, moved towards the open fireplace. But Holterman observed it not.
The shadow of the escapee drifted darkly across the uneven floor. Once, through an opening in the slabs, the light of a star flashed brightly for a second upon a naked blade, as if a fire-fly had gone by.
The hand of the prowler went up, and began to feel[124] upon the adzed-slab which formed the chimney shelf.
It crept along inch by inch until suddenly it encountered fur and claws.
The ’possum jumped frantically from the shelf. Jean Petit, taken by surprise, swore aloud as the tea tin fell upon the floor with a clattering noise, and the German leaped from the soap-box into the middle of the kitchen floor.
Hans was a powerful man, and the madness which worked in him with the wine gave him additional strength. He clutched the invader by the throat with both hands. Petit was thrown backwards upon the floor, partially stunned. But the next moment, feeling the tightening grip of strong hands on his neck, his strength and savagery came back to him in a wild, combative rush. The knife had fallen from his grasp. He put out his hands instinctively, and grasped his opponent also by the throat.
He stuck his knees into the German’s ribs and squeezed with all the strength of his lower limbs, at the same time using the power of his backbone and thighs in an endeavour to turn over upon his adversary.
They writhed and struggled like pythons close-locked in a combat to the death.
It was a question merely of time and endurance—one maniac against another; fighting to kill in silence—a duel with the hands.
Which would be choked first?
Jean Petit’s fingers were embedded in the German’s neck like talons.
The Death of the German.
Tom Pagdin, Pirate. Page 124.
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