broad-shouldered as the one whom he had seen crossing the courtyard
earlier in the night.
Doyle walked farther into the room and was halfway to the second door,
only fifteen feet from it when he suddenly understood the full
implications of the missing ax on the pegboard. He almost froze in
place. Then, warned by some sixth sense, he crouched and turned with
more speed and agility than he had ever shown in his life.
Looming immediately behind him, nightmarishly large, the wild-eyed blond
man raised both hands and swung the gardening ax.
Thirteen Not once in his entire thirty years had Alex Doyle been in a
fight-not a fist fight, wrestling match, or even a juvenile
push-and-shove. He had never dealt out physical punishment to anyone,
and neither had he taken any himself. Whether coward or genuinely
committed pacifist or both, he had always managed to avoid controversial
subjects in casual discussions, had avoided arguments and taking sides
and forming relationships which might conceivably have led to violence.
He was a civilized man. His few friends and acquaintances had always
been as gentle as he was himself, and often even gentler. He was
singularly unprepared to handle a raging maniac who was wielding a
well-sharpened gardener’s ax.
However, instinct served where experience failed. Almost as if he had
been combat-trained, Alex fell backward, away from the glittering blade,
and rolled across the greasestained cement floor until he came up hard
against the two riding lawn mowers.
His intellectual acceptance of the situation lagged far behind his
automatic physical-emotional realization of the danger. He had heard
the ax whistle past, inches from his head, and he knew what it would
have done to him if it had found its mark . . .
Yet, it was inconceivable that anyone could want to take his life,
especially in such a sudden bloody fashion. He was Alex Doyle. The man
without enemies. The man who had walked softly and carried no stick at
all-the man who had often sacrificed his pride to save himself from just
this sort of madness.
The stranger moved fast.
Dazed as he was, numb with surprise at the suddenness and extreme
ferocity of the attack, Alex still saw the man coming.
The stranger lifted the ax.
“Don’t!” Doyle said. He barely recognized his own voice. He had not
lost all of his new-found courage. However, it was now tempered by a
healthy fear which put it in the proper perspective.
The five-inch razored blade swept up, reached the top of its arc in one
smooth movement, almost a precision instrument in those strong hands.
Sharp slivers of light danced brightly on the cutting edge.
The blade hesitated up there, high and cold and fantastic-and then it
fell.
Alex rolled.
The ax dropped in his wake. It made the moist air whistle once again,
and it thudded into a solid rubber tire on one of the lawn mowers,
splitting the deep tread.
Doyle came to his feet, and once more powered by a mindless drive for
selfpreservation, vaulted over one of the workbenches, clearing the
four-foot width with more ease then he would ever have thought possible.
He stumbled, though, and nearly fell flat on his face when he came down
on the other side.
Behind him, the madman cursed: a curiously wordless, low grunt of anger
and frustration.
Doyle turned, fully expecting the ax to cleave either his head or the
surface of the wooden bench behind him. He had, at last, come to terms
with his predicament. He knew that he might die here.
Across the room, the stranger hunched his ‘ r broad shoulders and put
all his strength into them, wrenched the blade free of the solid,
uninflated tire in which it had become wedged. He turned, his wet shoes
scraping unpleasantly on the concrete floor, and he clutched the ax in
both hands as if it were some sacred and all-powerful talisman which
would ward off evil magic and protect the bearer from the work of
malevolent sorcerers. There was something of the superstitious savage
in this man, especially in and around those enormous dark-ringed eyes .
. .
Those same eyes now located Doyle. Incredibly, the stranger bobbed his