“‘And food?’ suggested Lynch.
“‘The food can wait,’ I muttered, fighting hard against the inclination to sleep—to drowse—to be let alone, to enjoy my intoxication in peace. ‘Come into the parlor!’ I said, and Lynch told me afterwards that my manner was as snappish as a dog with distemper.
“‘After you, friend McAdoo!’ said Lynch, rhymingly, and the accursed jingle got caught up in the swirl of ideas racing through my fevered brain, so that while I talked I kept hearing over and over, ‘After you, friend McAdoo—after you, friend McAdoo—after you’—b’r’rgh! What is more frightful than trying to do mental work in the face of a delirium?
“I am not clear as to just what McAdoo said; it was Lynch who made the opening move, and this time he did not say, ‘After you, friend McAdoo!’ He drew his revolver and waved McAdoo to a large lounging chair. I shall never forget that chair; it was a home-made, or rather a native-made chair like those one sees to-day, with a back the angle of which is regulated by a rod behind, which is dropped into notches—you know the kind. At the top there was a little pillow for the head to rest against—a little ‘baby-blue’ pillow—and it was hollowed in the middle where poor Cullen’s head had rested, and worn until the fabric held in a streaky sort of way that showed the white beneath. It was probably made in England by some girl parishioner, and there was something in its homeliness that made me feel as the diary had.
“It was crushed beneath McAdoo’s great shoulders as he sank into it—and he did sink, Doctor, as if he had been hamstrung. In the middle of the room there was a little bamboo table, on which the servant was about to set the lamp, but Lynch motioned to place it on a shelf behind him. He himself sat at the table, facing McAdoo, his back straight, as the back of a thoroughbred should be, and the revolver lying in his hand near the middle of the table.
“I walked up to him, staggering a little, and threw down the diary.
“‘What is this?’ asked Lynch.
“‘After you, friend—the diary of the Rev. R. M. Cullen! What do you think it is—a skull?’ I snapped. He raised his eyebrows.
“‘There is a divan at the end of the room, Doctor,’ he said, without taking his eyes from McAdoo. ‘Lie there, if you please, during our proceedings.’ There was a cold, official note in his voice which seemed to recall the shuffle of heavy feet, whispers, whimpers, somnolence on one side of the room and nerves stretched like the strings of a violin on the other. Dulled as I was, I could see that it brought back something to McAdoo, for it was at these very first words that he began to slump—doubly armed from the start as he had been, surrounded by his servants and in the house which he had claimed as his own.
“Then Lynch began to read—intently and with no apparent thought of the man opposite him. I had sunk in a heap on the divan, deliciously relaxed—leaving it all to Lynch, and humming, ‘After you, friend McAdoo,’ to myself, as I thought, until Lynch remarked, coldly: ‘Doctor, kindly refrain from interrupting the reading of the testimony.’ Then I subsided, very much embarrassed.