"You are not feeling very well," Sartoris called out. "If you are not altogether in a state of physical collapse, will you kindly walk this way. A little brandy will about fit the case."
Berrington was past protest and past flight, for the moment. He seemed to be sick to the soul. There came back to him the vivid recollection of the time when he had lain out in the jungle all night, with a bullet through his lungs, waiting wearily for death in the morning. He flung himself exhaustedly into a chair and gasped for breath. Sartoris watched him as some cold-blooded scientist might have watched the flaying of a live animal.
"Your heart is not nearly so bad as you think," he said. "When the pressure goes from your lungs you will be much better. That is a little dodge of mine which is built upon a pretty full knowledge of elec
tricity. Up to now I have not had an opportunity of giving it a good trial. Are you feeling any better?"
Berrington nodded. The colour was coming back to his cheeks now, the painful feeling at his chest was abating. The brandy was going to the right place.
"You malignant little fiend," he gasped. "I should be doing the world a service if I took you by the throat and squeezed the life out of you."
"Well, the remedy is in your hands, though I doubt whether or not a judge and jury would take the same sanguine view of the case. But you are free to try if you like. I am only a mere miserable bag of bones, and you are a strong man. Get to work."
The cackling challenge passed unheeded. Actually there was something about the strange little man to be afraid of. He took up the thread of conversation again.
"You will find that every exit is guarded in the same way," he said. "I have only to set the whole machinery in motion and you are powerless. You are in my hands. If you had touched me when I asked you just now, you would have been dead at my feet. But strange as it may seem, I have a heart hidden in this crooked little body of mine somewhere. I was not always bad, as you know. There was a time when I was another man."
"Never," Berrington said dispassionately. "The seeds of evil were always there."