A man lay stretched at full length on the white counterpane that covered the bed—a dead man. One glance told Rock that. Crimson marked the pillow that held his head, and crimson speckled the yellow and blue of a hooked rug on the floor. A hand basin, with crimson-stained cloths in it, stood on a chair.
“Look at him!” the girl whispered. “Look closely at his face!”
But Rock was already looking. He needed no prompting. He stared. The amazed certainty came to him that, except for very minor differences, he might well have been looking at his own corpse.
Yet he was alive, never more so. And he had no brothers, nor indeed any kin that so resembled him. Coincidence, he reflected. Such things were. No great mystery that, of the millions of men cast in the image of their Maker, the mold for two should be strangely alike. He did not now wonder at the shock he must have given this girl, when he stood in the doorway, the image of the man dead in her room.
But Rock passed at once to a more practical consideration. The man had been shot. His bared chest showed a blue-rimmed puncture.
“Do you wonder?” the girl’s voice said in his ear. “You see the resemblance. It is uncanny. You could pass for him anywhere. My heart stood still when I saw you in the doorway.”
Rock nodded. He put his hand on the body. The flesh was still soft, not yet cold.
“He hasn’t been dead long,” he remarked.
The girl looked down at the dead man and reached one slim-fingered hand to smooth the brown hair back from his forehead with a caressing gesture. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears.