The silence held for a moment, then broke in an explosive volume of sound. The women’s shrieks rose simultaneously—“Sybil! Sybil!” The name ran about the room, beat on the high ceiling and was buffeted from wall to wall.
“The dead woman!” Williams shook Shine’s arm in his incredulous amazement.
“It is—it’s her. I saw it when I developed it and I don’t know—something’s gone wrong.”
A raucous cry rose above the chorus of female voices. Stokes had dropped his hold on the chair, his starting eyes fixed on the picture. From his lips, curled back like an angry dog’s, came a strangling rush of words:
“She’s dead. She’s dead for I killed her. I shot her—she’s dead. She can’t come back, she never can come back. I shot her as she ran—I killed her—I saw her fall—she’s dead—dead!”
The words died in a groan. He pitched forward and lay a writhing moaning shape with hands that clawed and dug into the carpet. The men rushed at him, clustered about him, the women watching in dumb horror while the picture behind them slowly faded from the screen.
XVII
When they carried Stokes to his room they thought him dying, so ghastly was his appearance, so deathlike his collapse. Bassett telephoned to Hayworth for a doctor and before the man came, Flora, singularly cold and collected now the fight was over, told them her husband was a morphia addict and showed them the case in his bag with the empty vial. In the two days’ detention on the island his supply had been exhausted, the greatest strain of the many that had ended in his frantic confession.
When the doctor had made his examination and heard the facts he looked grave—the man was in desperate case, a complete breakdown of the whole organism and an overstrained heart. He thought there was little or no hope, but there might be a return to consciousness. If there was he promised to call the officers who were keen to get a fuller statement. Meantime he wanted the room cleared of everybody but Mrs. Stokes, and the men left, returning to the living-room to find Shine and get an explanation of the picture.
In the excitement of the Stokes sensation they had forgotten all about the picture and now, walking down the hall, they swung back to it. Bassett and Williams were baffled and confounded by it; it was one of the most startling of the whole chain of startling circumstances. Rawson was neither baffled nor confounded having already arrived at a solution: Shine had played a trick, done it on purpose to see if it might not accomplish just what it had accomplished. He was loud in his praise of the photographer, it was a clever ruse that had brought things to a climax when they might have gone on bungling for days. Rawson was willing to admit his mistakes—he’d been sure of the boy and now it appeared that Bassett and Miss Tracy were right. Joe Tracy had evidently lit out secretly on some business of his own.