“He is not!” McCarty responded. “If he’d meant to blow us up he’d have done it down in his sitting-room instead of turning that infernal smoke on us. He must have had that all fixed and ready to blind us, so that he could make whatever kind of a getaway he’d arranged. You couldn’t hear a cannon go off behind that solid steel, but whatever he’s doing, ’tis only to himself; you’ll mind the letter he wrote me? He wouldn’t have spoke of his diary unless he intended us to read it and it’s all part and parcel of his character, Denny. He couldn’t bear to go without the world knowing how clever he was!”
“‘Clever!’” Dennis shuddered. “But what did he do it all for, Mac? You asked him that when you accused him and he didn’t answer. He’d no reason and yet he wasn’t crazy! He’d such a grand manner and a way of making you feel like the scum of the earth in his presence without even trying to, that I would never have suspected him in the world! How you came to guess it is beyond me!”
“I’d the key to it all right from the start, only I didn’t know it!” McCarty responded as the inspector bounded up the stairs. “I’m only disgusted that the truth didn’t come to me sooner, and maybe the little lad and the nurse Lucette would have been spared.”
“Two of the best men in the department are on their way!” the inspector announced. “I had to stop to send in a second call for reserves to hold back the crowd that’s trying to storm the gates, for the news has got out somehow! Martin and Yost sent in the first call but the boys who responded can do no more with that mob than a one-armed sheriff in a riot!—Any sign from in there?”
The officials shook their heads and Jean remarked:
“I have seen once, when he goes in and does not know that I am near to him. Before he close the door I think that I see others still beyond this, but they are open and at the end is a room with shelves covered with bottles and glass tubes of a strange shape. On the floor is a great round tank of some metal higher than one’s head! I think then that he is perhaps a scientist, a great man! It is only after Hughes die and then the little Horace disappear that I begin to think he is a demon!—Here is André.”
The stout chef had labored up the stairs and behind him the flowing robes of Ching Lee moved like a shadow.
“You shall get him?” the former demanded. “You shall put him in that chair of electricity? Parbleu! When I think of the little Lucette so pretty and good, and the little Horace, I could run my knives through his heart! It is I who give him with these hands the glass of milk with which he drugs the little Horace and then I watch while that mountain of coal descend into the chute and I suspect nothing! It is only when my countrywoman die there before him and they say it is the poison gas that I think of this room and the so horrible odors which come from it when he open the door!”
“When did you see him come here last?” McCarty asked.
“On the afternoon of Wednesday, but a half hour before he cry out for help from the conservatory where Lucette dies!” He spread out his small fat hands in an expressive gesture. “I think it is to this room that he comes for I am in mine with the door a little open and he pass quickly and without sound; going up the stairs. He carries something round and blue on the end of a stick and I think that I must be mistake’ for it appears like the toy balloon of a child! Nevertheless I watch and in a so short time, a few minutes, he comes down again, still carrying the balloon. I tell of it to Ching Lee later but he has not seen it in the conservatory and he does not believe.”