Suddenly the scientist swayed and lurched forward. An influence as potent for death as the most murderous weapons of man was abroad, loosed when the glass shattered. The deadly fumes of the cyanide, rising from the base of the jar which its owner still held, were doing their work. With barely sense enough surviving to realise his new peril, he flung it far from him. A mist fell, like a curtain, somewhere between his eyes and his brain, befogging the processes of thought. Heavily he dropped to his hands and knees over the feet of the senseless juggler, his face toward Colton.
Colton seemed to have risen. This the professor took to be a figment of his reeling brain. It annoyed him.
“Lie down! Be quiet!” he muttered. “You are dead, and I am going to kill your murderer!”
Calling up all his will-power, he crawled to the juggler’s head and set his fingers to the palpitating throat. Another moment and the death of a fellow-man would have been upon the soul of the scholarly scientist, when an arm under his chest and an insistent voice in his ear brought him back to reason.
“In God’s name, Professor, don’t strangle the poor devil!”
The baresark grip relaxed. Professor Ravenden collapsed, rolled over on his back and looked up stupidly into the white face of Dick Colton.
“Where—where—is my pseudargiolus?” he asked plaintively.
“It’s all right, professor; there wasn’t any pseudargiolus. Just lie quiet for a moment.”
Professor Ravenden struggled up to a sitting posture. “Let me rise,” he cried. “I have lost my specimen of pseudargiolus. It fell when the jar broke.”
He looked about him, and his eyes fell on the juggler.