So this was the end! I braced myself to meet it.
"I will count a hundred slowly," he answered.
He began, and I stared dumbly at the pistol. I could not think--I could not commend my soul to my Maker even. The function of thought was entirely arrested.
My laughter, I know, was perfectly natural, full of genuine merriment. Something had happened which seemed to me irresistibly comic. He stopped and stared at me, his face changing ever so little.
"May I ask," he said, "what tickled your sense of humor?"
What had tickled my sense of humor was this. Stealing round from behind him, right under his very nose, so to speak, but quite unseen, was an arm which with infinite care and slowness was removing the heavy cut-glass decanter from the table. It vanished. It reappeared in the air behind him in a flashing diamond and amber circle.
"Have some whisky, Mr. Midwinter," I said, as it descended with a crash upon the side of his head.
Without a sound he sank into a huddled heap out of my sight, hidden by the table.
"You little devil!" I said, staggering to my feet, for Bill Rolston stood there, white-faced and grinning. "I had to come, Sir Thomas," he said, "it wasn't any use."
We bent down and made an examination. Midwinter's face was dark and suffused with blood, but his pulses were all right.
"What a pity!" said Rolston. "Help me to get him on to that chair, Sir Thomas, and we'll tie him up. If I had killed him, it would have been so much simpler!"
We dragged the unconscious man to the very armchair where I had sat under the menace of his pistol, and, tearing the tablecloth into strips, tied him securely.
"Fortunately," said Bill, "I didn't break the decanter. The stopper didn't even come out! You look pretty sick, Sir Thomas"--and indeed a horrible feeling of nausea had come over me, and my hands were shaking--"let's each have a drink and then I'll tell you what I think."
We sat down on each side of the table, and I listened to him as if the whole thing were some curious dream. For the second time I had been snatched from the very brink of death, and though I suppose I ought to have been getting used to it my only sensation was one of limpness and collapse.
"Can you do it?" my little friend said, pointing to the pistol between us.