She continued to stare at me with big gaunt eyes.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to keep the horror out of my tones. “It is I.”
She shuddered and collapsed to her knees, clinging to the door frame as a drowning man clutches and grips a bulwark. The pupils of her eyes were dilated with terror and despair until the purple iris was eclipsed, and they stared black and empty as burnt-out worlds.
“He is dead—dead,” she whispered. “He can’t speak, or move.”
I picked up the revolver and laid it on the table, and then I crossed to the rigid form on the floor. I knelt and pressed my ear to his heart. I lifted his hand; it fell back inertly. Yes, it was true. Randall Batterly was gone past recall, facing the great tribunal above, with who knew what black secret in his heart.
“We must get a physician,” I murmured dully.
Haidee crept to my side. Her poor face was blanched and twisted till she looked like a half-dead thing.
“Who could have done this—” I stammered, in a voice that sounded driveling and uncertain in my own ears.
Again that dumb look of distress in her eyes, and she stood as if carved in granite.
“My dear—my dear, you must come away—this is too much for you,” I continued hoarsely. I took her poor cold hands in mine. And then I turned and faced the door with a curious certainty that some one was looking at me, and I saw old Lundquist’s rat eyes peering in on us from the doorway.