The long table, the stands and chairs overturned, the phonograph-record files empty and flung about, the glass in the bookcases shattered and the books in a helter-skelter, the top of the piano swept clear of Hallowell's antique bronzes, drawers out, papers and blue-prints scattered everywhere—and the quiet form of his friend on the floor!
"Bob?" cried Mathison, the anguish of that moment the greatest he had ever known. "Bob?... God in heaven!"
He knelt. Dead. The body was still warm. Fifteen or twenty minutes ago Hallowell had been alive.... The length of a pair of coat-sleeves—an infinitesimal thing like that! Mathison strangled the great, heaving sob. A pair of coat-sleeves.... The irony of it! But for a trifle like that he would have been home in time, and this would never have happened.... Bob!
Slowly Mathison rose. The anguish, the tenderness, slowly left his handsome face. It became hard, a little older, and there flashed from his eyes a relentless fury. He neither cursed nor gesticulated; all his subsequent acts were quiet ones. He prowled about the room, his scrutiny that of a man who knew how to hunt for little things; but he found nothing which would indicate the identity of the assailants.
A foot or so beyond the Bokhara lay a small bronze elephant, one of Hallowell's paper-weights. Mathison did not touch it; he would never be able to touch that again.
Bob Hallowell, matey, straight and loyal and brave!—done to death in this fashion! Mathison leaned against the jamb of the door, his face in the crook of his elbow. The one human being he had loved in years—as men sometimes love each other! And while he had been fussing over the sleeves of a civilian's coat, Bob had sobbed out his life on the floor there! It was not the end itself, it was the manner of the end that was so horrible. Bob, who had always prayed that he might die at sea!
Mathison flung his arm from his eyes. The woman in the white pith helmet! But immediately he dismissed this idea. There had been no woman here. Only three men or more could have beaten down Hallowell, who was tremendously strong and active. God, what a fight it had been! and in the end—probably as he was getting the best of it—some one had struck him down from behind. And he had crawled toward the dining-room; for there was a sinister trail across the grass matting. Dying, he had crawled toward the dining-room. Why?
In God's name why had he not let them search? The uselessness of it! He had thrown away his life to justify an instinct—the active resentment of a brave man against permitting alien hands to meddle with his belongings. Bob had always been without guile, moral resiliency; like a bulldog, he had never retreated, stepped back.
"Mat, you lubber, where's my tobacco?... Malachi!" Once more that singular wail.