only one.
The colonel’s laughter seemed higher-pitched now, as he said “Come!”
Holmes was holding the Webley down, at arm’s length, the safety catch released, the chamber carefully positioned. He began to raise it, his arm coming higher like a clock hand until it was horizontal. I watched for the forefinger to tighten on the trigger. But to my surprise, his arm kept rising. He would never hit Moran now! Higher and higher went the arm, until the gun was pointing at the sky. Then I could see that Moran was prepared to shoot first until Holmes called out, “Major Putney-Wilson, if you please!”
Moran would not have been human had he not paused to see what this meant. In a moment of surprise, he looked like a man who feels he has been harpooned. A second later there was a roar from the muzzle of the skyward-pointing Webley and a flash of fire. Holmes was not looking at Moran, but somewhere just beyond him. The colonel’s eyes, which had been flicking here and there, now went still and round as marbles. With his pistol covering Holmes, Colonel Moran half-turned and saw a figure like a ghost in the vapour. The man took shape, tall and dishevelled, a cotton cap on his head, his body cased in a grimy boiler-suit, his face immaculately blackened by soot, the eyes and lips alone visible. In his hand was the silver Laroux pistolet of Sherlock Holmes.
In that same second, Holmes leapt at his enemy. The length of his reach was always extraordinary, but never more so than in this flying leap. His feet never touched the ground until the moment of impact. He was on Moran before the colonel could raise his gun. Moran was a ferocious hunter, but his skill was with his gun rather than with his fists—and with his fists rather than in his arms. Their collision enabled Holmes to knock aside the Von Herder pistol.
Each recoiled from the impact. Moran at once tried to snatch Holmes round the neck and double him over, imprisoning him in the traditional English wrestling grip of “chancery.” But when he closed his arm round his opponent’s neck, it had apparently dissolved into air. Holmes had dived and caught Moran round the waist, tossing him over his shoulder like a sack of coals. The colonel’s teeth were brought together by the shock with a force that might have broken his jaw.
In a second more, Holmes threw him down on his back, knocking out his breath and catching him by the feet. What followed was more like a ballet than a prize-fight. The strength in Holmes’s hands was daunting, as anyone would know who had watched him casually bend straight Dr. Roylott’s distorted iron poker. From a spell of education in Germany, he was schooled in boxing and fencing as well as in the less common art of singlestick. In some forms of combat, Moran might have been his superior. But Holmes had waited for his chosen time and his chosen place. Despite his bulk, Moran seemed helpless as Holmes, with footwork quicker and more intricate than a dancer’s, swung him by the feet in circle after circle at increasing speed. The art of it was to make the helpless victim gain velocity until he appeared to contribute to his own destruction.
At a precise moment, Sherlock Holmes released him and sent him hurtling into what I believe is called a “Tipperary swing.” The colonel went head-first into the steel plating of the saloon. What damage was done to him I do not care to speculate, but it was surely the end of Rawdon Moran. So neatly had Holmes despatched him that the senseless body slid down and through the opening in the deck where the engine-room skylight had once been. The colonel fell like Satan into the darkness below, between the motionless pistons of the ship’s engines. Knocked side to side, he crashed on to the barrel-shape of the steel condenser below them. I cannot tell at what point he was dead, but the white paintwork of the condenser showed him face down, head and hair washing to and fro in the rising flood. He was then as dead as any man had ever been.
The conclusion of that night’s drama may be briefly described. As any reader of the press will know, the wreck of the Comtesse de Flandre was very nearly saved, perhaps in the belief that Plon Plon’s baubles were on board. The breaking away of