And these were followed by curses and moans; by cries for help and yells of terror, and by the whole gamut of noises that men might make under such conditions.
They can be better imagined than described.
From an almost silent body of men moving up the stairway these were transformed into a horde of madmen who were too greatly terrorized to think, too frightened to guess what had happened, and who were really in too great pain to do more than shout and curse and cry out for help.
Nick left the current as he had switched it on with that second move of his hand, and then sprang to another switchboard where he moved another lever, and thus threw on the electric lights, so that instantly the stairway was flooded with brilliancy.
Then he ran out into the hall, where the senator was clinging to the balustrade, doubled up with laughter by the scene that Was enacted before him.
And it was ludicrous-to the observer. It was not at all funny to the victims of the incident.
The men along the stairs, from the bottom to the top, were writhing in all sorts of shapes.
Their bodies and arms and legs were contorted; their faces were drawn and haggard with pain. Their eyes were staring, and strained, and filled with terror.
Some of them had fainted, partly from fright and partly from the force of the shock itself; and these would have fallen to the steps had it not been for the fact that the terrific force of the current held them so that they could not let go their holds.
Down in the lower hall, one man held tightly to the brass knob of the door, and he was struggling and cursing with all his might, in his mad efforts to pull his hands away from the invisible forces that held them, for in trying to release himself he had seized the knob with the other hand, and it now held tightly to both.