It struck with a thud and sent the water squirting from the saturated cap. The thief, without cry or word, spun round, waving his hands in the air, and then fell heavily face downward. For a moment he quivered, and once or twice made a convulsive movement, then lay still, the water running from his clothes along the floor.
With the cane still in his hand, Essex came around the table and looked at him. For a space he stood staring, his hand resting on the edge of the table, his neck craned forward, his face set in a rigid intensity of observation. The sudden silence that had succeeded to the loud tones of Harney’s voice was singularly deep and solemn. The room seemed held in a spell of stillness, almost awful in its suddenness and isolation.
“Get up,” he said in a low voice. “Harney, get up.”
There was no response, and he leaned forward and pushed at the motionless figure with the cane.
“Damn!” he said under his breath, “he’s fainted.”
And throwing the cane away, he approached the man and bent over him. There was no sound of breathing or pulse of life about the sodden figure with its hidden face. Drops formed on Essex’s forehead as he turned it over. Then, as it confronted him, livid with fallen jaw and a gleam of white between the wrinkled eyelid, the drops ran down his face.
With a hand that shook as Harney’s had a few moments before he felt the pulse and then tore the shirt open and tried the heart. His face was white as the man’s on the floor as he poured whisky down the throat that refused to swallow. Finally, tearing off his coat, he knelt beside his victim and tried every means in his power to bring back life into the miserable body in which he had only recognized a tool of his own. But there was no response. The minutes ticked on, and there was no glimmer of intelligence in the cold indifference of the eyes, no warmth round the stilled heart, no flutter of breath at the slack, gray lips.
The night was still dark, the rain in his ears, when he rose to his feet. A horror unlike anything he had even imagined was on him. All the things in life he had struggled for seemed shriveled to nothing. The whole worth of his existence was contained in the unlovely body on the floor. To bring life back to it he would have given his dearest ambition—sacrificed love, money, happiness—all for which he had held life valuable, and thought himself blessed. What a few hours before were ends to struggle and sin for seemed now of no moment to him. Mariposa had faded to a dim, undesired shadow; the millions she stood for to dross he would have passed without a thought. How readily would he have given it all to bring back the breath to the creature he had held as a worm beneath his foot!
He seized the table-cloth and threw it over the face whose solemn, tragic calm filled him with a sick dread. Then with breathless haste he flung some clothes into a valise and made the fire burn high with the letters and papers he threw on it at intervals. The first carts of the morning had begun their rattling course through the stirred darkness when he crept out, a haggard, hunted man.
He had to hide himself in unfrequented corners, cower beneath the shadow of trees on park benches till the light strengthened and morning shook the city into life. Then, as its reawakening tides began to surge round him, he made a furtive way—for the first time in his life fearful of his fellow men—to the railway station, and there took the earliest south-bound train for the Mexican border.