"Yes."
"Is this the one?"
Craig stared—a look of negation that made Harry's heart leap. It was a look also that held no recognition, and in that instant, for the first time since that night's harrowing series of events had begun, Harry remembered that he stood in strange guise, in unaccustomed clothes and with smooth-shaven chin.
But into the eyes that gazed from the pillow recognition speedily came—recognition strangely commingled of incredulity, amaze, distempered suspicion, leaping swiftly to a slow, deadly certainty. A lurid sequence was running across the fevered mind that the man confronting him could not read:
Harry Sevier sculking there and disguised—one of the burglars! The missing letters—Echo had gone with them! It had been a cunning, hypocritical plot, then, with a hired safe-robber and thug—and they had tricked and baffled him. Craig gasped. His eyes suffused with blood. He had said that he had not known the woman. Yet he could still score! Living or dying, he could drag down Harry Sevier to a black depth from which he should never rise again!
He laughed, a harsh jarring laugh. His face became convulsed. He tried to lift himself on an elbow. The nurse thrust her strong arms beneath the pillow and raised him. He pointed his finger at Harry.
"Yes!" he said in a crackling whisper. "He is the man who—did it! He—shot me!"
"Do you know him?" The officer spoke clearly, leaning forward.
"Yes. I—he is—"
But that was all. With a final vain effort, his head fell back on the pillow. That last flare of rage, of revengeful hatred, had exhausted the sick vitality, and he was gone into unconsciousness.