“Quick, sir—­quick!” screamed Burke, starting up from the pillow.

The questing hands had reached his throat!

Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across the room and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms.

Heavens!  Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons, as those beneath the hirsute skin!  They seemed to be of steel wire, and with a sudden frightful sense of impotence, I realized that I was as powerless as a child to relax that strangle-hold.  Burke was making the most frightful sounds and quite obviously was being asphyxiated before my eyes!

“Smith!” I cried, “Smith!  Help! help! for God’s sake!”

Despite the confusion of my mind I became aware of sounds outside and below me.  Twice the thing at the window coughed; there was an incessant, lash-like cracking, then some shouted words which I was unable to make out; and finally the staccato report of a pistol.

Snarling like that of a wild beast came from the creature with the hairy arms, together with renewed coughing.  But the steel grip relaxed not one iota.

I realized two things:  the first, that in my terror at the suddenness of the attack I had omitted to act as pre-arranged:  the second, that I had discredited the strength of the visitant, whilst Smith had foreseen it.

Desisting in my vain endeavor to pit my strength against that of the nameless thing, I sprang back across the room and took up the weapon which had been left in my charge earlier in the night, but which I had been unable to believe it would be necessary to employ.  This was a sharp and heavy axe, which Nayland Smith, when I had met him in Covent Garden, had brought with him, to the great amazement of Weymouth and myself.

As I leaped back to the window and uplifted this primitive weapon, a second shot sounded from below, and more fierce snarling, coughing, and guttural mutterings assailed my ears from beyond the pane.

Lifting the heavy blade, I brought it down with all my strength upon the nearer of those hairy arms where it crossed the window-ledge, severing muscle, tendon and bone as easily as a knife might cut cheese. . . .

A shriek—­a shriek neither human nor animal, but gruesomely compounded of both—­followed . . . and merged into a choking cough.  Like a flash the other shaggy arm was withdrawn, and some vaguely-seen body went rolling down the sloping red tiles and crashed on to the ground beneath.

With a second piercing shriek, louder than that recently uttered by Burke, wailing through the night from somewhere below, I turned desperately to the man on the bed, who now was become significantly silent.  A candle, with matches, stood upon a table hard by, and, my fingers far from steady, I set about obtaining a light.  This accomplished, I stood the candle upon the little chest-of-drawers and returned to Burke’s side.