Kennedy knelt over the man, who was nearest the door.
“Call a doctor, quick,” he ordered, reaching over and feeling the pulse of the woman, who had half fallen out of her chair. “They will, be all right soon. They took what they thought was their usual adulterated cocaine—see, here is the box in which it was. Instead, I filled the box with the pure drug. They’ll come around. Besides, Carton needs both of them in his fight.”
“Don’t take any more,” muttered the woman, half conscious. “There’s something wrong with it, Haddon.”
I looked more closely at the face in the half-darkness.
It was Haddon himself.
“I knew he’d come back when the craving for the drug became intense enough,” remarked Kennedy.
Carton looked at Kennedy in amazement. Haddon was the last person in the world whom he had evidently expected to discover here.
“How—what do you mean?”
“The episode of the telephone booth gave me the first hint. That is the favourite stunt of the drug fiend—a few minutes alone, and he thinks no one is the wiser about his habit. Then, too, there was the story about his speed mania. That is a frequent failing of the cocainist. The drug, too, was killing his interest in Loraine Keith—that is the last stage.
“Yet under its influence, just as with his lobbygow and lieutenant, Brodie, he found power and inspiration. With him it took the form of bombs to protect himself in his graft.”