With perfect ease, now, he twisted the knife from the failing grasp, and, with his left hand, he reinforced the throat-grip of his right.

As he did so, he got his legs under him and arose, dragging upward with him the all but senseless body of his garroted foe.
It had been a pretty bit of work, from the start, and one upon which his monkey-faced Japanese jui-jutsu instructor would have lavished a grunt of approval.
He had conquered an armed and muscular enemy by his knowledge of anatomy and by applying the simple grip he had learned.
And now, the heaving half-dead murderer was at his mercy.
Gavin swung the feebly twitching body out, more fully into the streak of light from the house, noting, subconsciously that the light ray was twice as broad as before, by reason of the door's standing open.
But, before he could concentrate his gaze on the man he held, he saw several million other things.

And all the several million were multi-hued stars and bursting bombs.
The entire universe seemed to have exploded and to have chosen the inside of his brain as the site for such annoying pyrotechnics.

Dully he was aware that his hands were loosening their death-grip and that his arms were falling to his sides.

Also, that his knees had turned to hot tallow and were crumbling, under him.
None of these amazing phenomena struck him as at all interesting.