With the certainty of Rona's guilt fixed in my mind by her possession of Allen's knife, I had no doubt, from the moment the hound's baying indicated it had turned into the clearing, that it was hot on her trail. But even so, the brute's entry by the bedroom door had been so unexpected and so swift that I had not stirred from my tracks to the girl's defence when the snarling animal, shooting across the room, brought up against the wall close beside her. Even Ranga, leaping forward instantly as he had, was scarcely past the middle of the floor when the beast regained its balance and bearings almost at the girl's feet. Drawing back into the angle of the walls and crouching low like a cornered cat, Rona awaited the attack, while Ranga, barehanded, and I with the throwing-knife rushed in to her aid. Without an instant's hesitation, the savage beast spun to a full right-about and, brushing the girl's advanced knee as though it was no more than the piano stool, launched itself full at the throat of the yellow man.
Ranga's counter was swift, sure and terrible. He might have been fighting bloodhounds barehanded from childhood, for all the surprise and dismay he showed at the sudden attack. Where my own instinct (if I had not tried to side-step the charge completely) would have been to grapple for the brute's throat from beneath, he simply struck--or rather grabbed--down from above. The impact crushed the snarling beast to the floor, but when Ranga raised his arm again he was gripping his struggling canine adversary by the scruff of the neck. Or rather, I thought it was the scruff. In reality his grip was a bit more inclusive.
Holding the floundering black form at arm's length with no more effort than if it had been a terrier, Ranga suddenly tightened his hold. I saw the hound's red-lidded eyes grow slant and elongated like a Chinaman's as the skin of its scalp was drawn backward in the relentless vise closing from behind; then a grinding snick cut short an unearthly scream of pain, and the hound was dangling limp and lifeless with a crumpled spine at the end of a gibbet of knotted yellow muscle. Ranga tossed lightly aside what a moment before had been a flying bolt of wrath, and where the great head doubled under against a flowered chintz window-curtain I saw the sprawling outline of a tooth-torn ear, doubtless the scar of a fight with a luckier ending.