"Who is he?" asked someone, and the officer shook his head.
"Search me," he said. "He smells like a booze-barrel. I ought to have locked him up the first time."
An ambulance came with much clanging of its gong, and when they examined him at Bellevue, searching his pockets, they found some letters and Mary's memorandum. So they learned his identity, and sent a telephone message to the theater—to be followed a half-hour later by a second announcing that life was extinct.
But while old Thomas was making his dash for the top of the stairs at the elevated, the landlord, followed by a physician, tapped on the door of the room Thomas Burton had left—and, receiving no response, the pair went in. Swiftly the doctor labored, and as the powerful hypodermic worked, the old woman rallied a little and her lids wavered and opened. Her eyes wandered about the place and she spoke with a feeble voice.
"Who are you?"
"I am the doctor, but you mustn't try to talk," came the grave reply.
"Where are my children—my boys and my girl?" Elizabeth Burton's face suddenly became a face of terror and her eyes dilated. "Where are my children?" she once more demanded.
"There is no one here just now." The doctor spoke as soothingly as he could. "You mustn't talk."
A spark of returned sanity crept into the dying woman's pupils and she groaned. "No one here! I remember," she said while she shook with a sudden realization. "I remember—they're all gone." Her gaze traveled around the squalid room, and realized what that meant, too. "Am I dying?" she inquired. The physician murmured something evasive, and from her thin lips broke a low, smothered outcry. "Yes," she said, striving to rise and falling back, "I'm dying—alone—abandoned—by myself—in this attic."
Then her eyes closed. The physician bent over the bed with his fingers on the pulse, and then bent his ear to the breast.