Kate Plus 10 by Edgar Wallace — Read

It is a fact worth remarking upon, that in all her career, though she had been associated with the most desperate of criminals, and though she had been surrounded on all sides by men who would stop at nothing to gain their ends, Kate had never witnessed an act of violence. Such arrests of members of the confederation as she had seen had been very humdrum affairs. The arrival of two strangers, a consultation carried on in a low tone by a pleasant detective officer, an urgent call to somebody to "get my hat" and the disappearance, very often for a long time, of the member affected. She had never seen a fellow creature manhandled nor did she believe that there was in her confederates the tigerish malignity which was now displayed. She looked from face to face in amazement and horror as they crowded round the handcuffed figure and flung him into a chair.

Michael had been choked to insensibility at the first attack. With the loosening of the rope, he had recovered consciousness and put up a fight, and had been hammered back to insensibility by the three men who had watched him from the moment he had crossed the open ground to the east of the railway, and had lain in wait for him. They had manacled him with his own handcuffs. This he realized, as he came back to consciousness, with his head throbbing and every bone in his body aching.