“Let’s be honest with ourselves for once,” said Gene. “I was the one who found Defarge, hatless, coatless, his shirt torn open at the neck, wandering about in the old cemetery on the evening of tap day. I took him to his room and watched him all night long.”
“And you’ve told us how he raved about Merriwell’s dead eyes,” came hoarsely from Hull.
“The fellow had been drinking dope of some sort,” asserted Gene. “I’ve told you that.”
“Dwiven to dwink by the injuthice he had endured,” put in Lew, with an effort to be dramatic.
“Just so, chummie,” nodded Ollie.
“He had taken to drink, all right, all right,” nodded Gene. “But he acted exactly as if he had been hypnotized by those dead eyes he raved about.”
“What do you suppose made him talk about Merriwell having dead eyes?” asked Chickering.
“I was with him long enough to know that he seemed to see some sort of vision. He talked about a fountain in the blackness of a dark night, and a face down in the fountain—a face that seemed luminous, so he could see it for all of the darkness. It seemed to me that he thought he had drowned Merriwell in that fountain, but he fancied it was far off in Italy, or some foreign country.”
“And all those wild fancies were brought about by his terrible disappointment,” said Julian Ives.