“Get them,” said Keeban.
The fellow stepped to a locker at the side of the room; he stooped, and, reaching in, he brought out a pair of white rabbits in one hand, another pair hung by their ears from his other fist.
“Rabbits,” said Keeban, with a sort of play at apology to Doris and me. “I know you got guinea pigs; but rabbits do just as well and they show better.”
He took them from the man who held them and he stepped again into the glass room and tossed the four white rabbits upon the table. Carefully he closed the door when he came out.
He went to the end of the cabinet where now I noticed, when he touched it, a thin pipe with a cock right against the glass. He twisted the cock and he returned to us.
The end of the pipe pierced the glass, I saw; but now that the cock was turned, nothing visible came from it. Stenewisc’s gas was colorless and odorless, I remembered. I did not expect to smell it through the glass of the cabinet; but I could not help expecting the rabbits, on the table there, to show some alarm. They discerned nothing threatening, however.
Timidly they tried this end of the table and now that. They hopped about, nosing each other, naturally enough. Nothing at all seemed to be happening. Then a lethargy crept over them. They did not sleep; they remained awake but became slower and slower in their motions. Yet nothing alarmed them; they seemed to sense nothing at all but the difficulty of motion. They nosed up, seeming to search for this intangible thing which was restraining them. They drooped, as though pressed down; but they remained awake and gave not a squeal nor a quiver of pain.
Surely it was painless, as well as invisible and intangible, too,—this amazing death from Stenewisc’s gas.
“No trouble at all, you see,” said Keeban to me. “You never know it.”
He knew how horrible that gradual, invisible death was; a shot or a knife, or anything sudden, would have been ten times more merciful. It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m sure that pain—some pain, at least—would have made it less terrible. It was uncanny, you see.