among a hundred conflicting noises. It was a scream, a shrill,
piercing squeal that did not rise to a crescendo, but started at
its maximum and held the note; a squeal which could only proceed
from one throat: the deafening war-cry of the Little Nugget.

I had grown accustomed, since my arrival at Sanstead House, to a
certain quickening of the pace of life, but tonight events
succeeded one another with a rapidity which surprised me. A whole
cinematograph-drama was enacted during the space of time it takes
for a wooden match to burn.

At the moment when the Little Nugget gave tongue, I had just
struck one, and I stood, startled into rigidity, holding it in the
air as if I had decided to constitute myself a sort of limelight
man to the performance.

It cannot have been more than a few seconds later before some
person unknown nearly destroyed me.

I was standing, holding my match and listening to the sounds of
confusion indoors, when this person, rounding the angle of the
house in a desperate hurry, emerged from the bushes and rammed me
squarely.

He was a short man, or he must have crouched as he ran, for his
shoulder--a hard, bony shoulder--was precisely the same distance
from the ground as my solar plexus. In the brief impact which
ensued between the two, the shoulder had the advantage of being in
motion, while the solar plexus was stationary, and there was no
room for any shadow of doubt as to which had the worst of it.