“Ach! how I see it now, Doctor, just as I saw it then; as if I was standing apart—a fourth person regarding the other three: Lynch with the light behind him, his face in the shadow, carefully reading the journal and apparently oblivious to the fully armed giant who appeared to have shrunk on sinking into the chair of his late victim; apparently oblivious to me also as I lay muttering on the divan at the other end of the room, and rousing myself at longer intervals, as the conflagration within my veins gained headway. The servant in placing the lamp upon the shelf had moved a little clock, which had run down, and the jar had set it ticking, and this and the sharp rustle as Lynch turned the leaves were the only noises in that room—unless my mutterings were audible, which may have been.
“Such a fever as mine is like a fire, Doctor; it leaps upward, then sinks, flickers, smoulders for a while, and then bursts out to rage with fresh fury. It was in one of these lapses, one of these returns almost to the normal, that Lynch finished his perusal.
“I opened my eyes as he laid down the journal with a smart slap. Lynch had turned half-way in his chair, and the yellow light threw out in sharp profile his straight brow, short aquiline nose and firm legal mouth and chin. There is a forensic type, just as there is any other type, and this was Lynch’s, except that there was to him an element of the terse and martial rather than the parliamentary. His revolver was lying in the center of the table, and his sinewy hands were in front of him, just beneath his chin, the finger-tips touching, the elbows on the arms of his chair.
“McAdoo was in the same position—the position of the rabbit confronted by the stoat; shoulders hunched, head sunk, muscle-heavy arms hanging limp outside the arms of the chair, utterly relaxed, yet held half-bent by the tonic contraction of the biceps, and so utter was this relaxation that the hands seemed swollen, the veins on the dorsum stretched to bursting. His bloodshot eyes were fastened on the revolver in front of him, which was nickeled and threw the limpid lamp-light from its separate planes in steady tongues of flame. Perhaps it was this that held him—the hypnosis, the somnambulizing of the optic nerve.
“‘Where is the daughter of Robert Cullen?’ asked Lynch, crisply. McAdoo started; his great head was raised with a jerk of such suddenness that one could almost hear the creak of the cervical vertebræ. And his voice! Ah! it was ridiculous. You have heard the whistle of this steamer, Doctor, when on entering a port the cord is pulled while the whistle is still filled with the water of condensation? It was such a noise.
“‘Where is the daughter?—answer me, man!’ said Lynch, sharply.
“I clapped my hands and one of the soft-footed women slithered to the door of the room. It was the same who had taken me to the deaf-mute girl.
“‘Bring your mistress hither,’ said I. The woman vanished.
“Our speech had brought a change in McAdoo. The lusterless look had left his eyes, and even in my benumbed condition I detected a twitching of his thick fingers.
“‘After you——’ I began, thickly, then realized that I was talking nonsense, but Lynch also had seen the movement. His hand fell upon the revolver.