He remembered, with a throb of excited pleasure on dismissing a hideous suspicion from his mind, and on entering normally into the joys of chance and danger, that he had one weapon which might turn out to be exceedingly useful in his present predicament. He had come away without his gun, but he had with him the tiny pocket lamp, the electric torch of small dimensions but great power, which had been the joy of his life ever since it had been given him. Like all nice men, he was a child in his infatuated love of new toys! He drew the little cylinder from his coat pocket cautiously, and, with the same exultant feeling that an aviator doubtless knows when he drops a bomb on a munitions factory, he flashed it. The result was surprising. Straight in front of him was a square, black hole in the floor. If he had taken that step forward and to the right which she had urged, he would have gone headlong to practically certain death. The human brain, being quicker than anything else in the universe, reminded him that there had been some unexplained disappearances in this neighborhood. But he was now chiefly concerned in finding out who the woman was. Before he could flash his light in her face she had flung herself upon him. There was no more pretense about her. She was grimly, fiercely determined to force him toward that wicked, black hole into eternity. Not a single word did she utter; she did not even call for assistance, though, since the people in this house were her friends or tools, she might well have done so. She seemed consumed by one single, burning desire: to thrust him with her own hands into the pit. Never had Jim struggled against such ferocity of purpose. She was like a demon rather than a woman, in the way she writhed between his hands, and forced her limited strength against his trained muscles in the bold and frantic effort to annihilate him. And, in that dense blackness, it was a toss-up as to who would win. The woman herself might easily have gone headlong into the very trap she had planned for him. But she did not seem to think or to care for that; her whole force of being was centered, it seemed, in the one sole purpose of his destruction. At that furious, struggling moment, Barrison became convinced of an odd thing. He was perfectly certain, against all the testimony of all the world, that the woman who fought him so murderously was not only the woman who had planned his own death that night, but also the criminal for whom they were so assiduously seeking. He was sure that his hands at that very minute grasped the person who had killed Alan Mortimer. It seemed to last forever, that silent, breathless struggle in the dark. But finally he got her hands pinioned behind her in one of his, and deliberately, though with a beating heart, raised his electric torch and flashed it full in her face. Mutinous, defiant, almost mad with rage for the moment, the dark eyes of Kitty Legaye blazed back at him.