Hamilton Craigie

“ The scream, lodged in her throat now, seemed like a bird beating against bars; in a moment the silence would be ripped from end to end, as a sheet is ripped from point to point, with the tearing impact of that scream, rising heavenward with the first defiling touch of those groping fingers. Armitage's face on that evening had been the face of a satyr, high-colored, the nose sharpened to a point of greed, the eyes in a wide, avid staring upon the perfect curve of her shoulders, her neck. ”

“ But mostly it was a fight in silence and darkness, with the quick, hard breathing of men at the last desperate urge of their spent strength.
With her finger again upon the light switch, again she hesitated, and in that flash of time she heard all at once a quick, sobbing breath—a groan—then silence.
Somewhere out there in that midnight blackness her husband might be lying wounded—dead—above him the beast whom she had known as Ronald the Debonair, turning his face now toward the girl who, shivering and defenseless, crouched forlorn upon the bed. ”

“ But that velvet black before her was, as she knew, most terribly endowed with motion, sinister, alive, awaiting merely the spark, the pressure of rigid finger upon trigger, the touch of hand against hand, the faintest whisper of a sound, to dissolve in a chaos of red ruin—and with it the ruin of her world.
Abruptly, again she heard that muffled ticking, this time close at hand, and with it, as she fancied, the faint breathing of a man. But even as she heard it, it receded, died; there came the faint snick of metal upon metal, like the snick and slither of a steel blade ”