With a howl of hatred more horrible than that of any tiger--for no wild beast is half so hellish in its cruelty as your human tiger--he sprang at me, beating at my face, now with closed fist, now open-handed and with clutching, tearing nails, kicking with his feet, biting and snapping at my hands and throat like a dog, and screaming like a very madman. To this day it consoles me not a little for the lapse of self-possession which I had just before manifested to think that I never lost presence of mind during this onslaught. When he came at me, my one thought was to see that he made use of no weapons. His wild-cat clawing and scratching it was no difficult matter for any one with a quick eye and cool head to ward off; but when I saw him clap his hand to his hip, where, had he been wearing male clothing, a pistol or knife might well have lain, the eye I kept upon him was, I promise you, a keen one. Finding no pocket at his hips reminded him no doubt of his woman’s dress, for his hand slipped down to the side of his skirt, where it floundered about as helplessly as a fish out of water. A woman’s pocket is, to the degenerate male mind, a fearful and wonderful piece of mechanism. The intention of the designer was apparently to offer special inducements to pickpockets, and so to construct the opening that the contents should either fall out altogether and be lost, or should be swallowed up by dark and mysterious depths into which no male hand dare venture to penetrate. The only way to get at anything which happens to be wanted seems to be to haul the entire pocket to the surface, very much as a fishing-net is hauled from the depths of the sea, and to turn it inside out in search of the missing article. On the occasion in question, Mullen was in too much of a hurry to adopt this course, and, but for the seriousness of the situation, I could have smiled, as I held him at arm’s length, to see him diving and fumbling among those unplumbed depths. When at last he rose, so to speak, gasping, to the surface, his hand was clutching a pistol-barrel, but the butt had in some way caught the lining of the dress, and in order to extricate it he had to turn the entire pocket inside out. In doing so, a folded paper fell, unseen by him, to the floor, and this I determined at all costs to secure. Before he could raise his arm to use the pistol, I laid a hand of iron upon his. As I gripped the fingers which were grasping the butt they scrunched sickeningly and relaxed their hold of the pistol, which I wrenched away and tossed upon the bunk. Then I closed with him that we might try a fall together. Twisting my heel behind his ankle I jerked him backwards and had him off his legs in a jiffy. We fell to the floor--he under and I above--with a crash, and as we did so my hand closed over the paper, to secure which I had thrown him.