And as the sahib threw himself from the
saddle the jamadar, with a snarl like a wounded tiger, dropped the girl
and, whirling, grappled with the Englishman.
Barlow was strong; few men in the force, certainly none in the
officers' mess, could put him on his back; and he was lithe, supple as
a leopard; and in combat cool, his mind working like the mind of a
chess player: but he realised that the arms about him were the arms of
a gorilla, the chest against which he was being crushed was the chest
of a trained wrestler; a smaller man would have heard his bones
cracking in that clutch.
He raised a knee and drove it into the groin of the jamadar; then in
the slight slackening of the holding arms as the Bagree shrank from the
blow, he struck at the bearded chin; it was the clean, trained
short-arm jab of a boxer.
But even as the gorilla wavered staggeringly under the blow, a soft
something slipped about Barlow's throat and tightened like the coils of
a python. And behind something was pressing him to his death. The
other Bagree springing to the assistance of Hunsa had looped his
_roomal_ about the Sahib's throat with the art of a thug.
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