The scuttling crowd came up with him, broke about him, swept past him. A loud explosion sounded; a flare of light broke full against the cavalry hat; a stifling odour of picric acid filled the air and gripped the throat, and with its coming, man and hat slid down the wall and dropped at its foot a crumpled heap that never in this world would stand erect again.
“Killed! Killed!” half-cried, half-groaned the superintendent, staggering a bit as the crowd flew on up the alley and vanished around the corner of the street into which it merged. “Oh, my God! After all my care; after all my love for him! Killed like a dog. Oh, Cleek! Oh, Cleek! The dearest friend—the finest pal—the greatest detective genius of the age!” And then, swinging his arm up and across his eyes and holding it there, made a queer choking sound behind the sheltering crook of it.
But of a sudden a voice spoke up from the darkness of the open door near by and said quietly:
“That’s the finest compliment I ever had paid me in all my life, Mr. Narkom. Don’t worry over me, dear friend; I’m still able to sit up and take nourishment. The Apaches have saved the public executioner a morning’s work. Colliver has parted with his brains forever; and may God have mercy on his soul!”
“Cleek!” Mr. Narkom scarcely knew his own voice, such a screaming thing it was. “Cleek, dear chap, is it you?”
“To be sure. Come inside here if you doubt it. Come quickly; there’s a crowd of quite a different sort coming: the report of that bomb has aroused the neighbourhood; and I have quite enough of crowds for one evening, thank you.”
Narkom was inside the building before you could have said Jack Robinson, “pump-handling” Cleek with all his might and generally deporting himself like a man gone daft.
“I thought they’d finished you! I thought they’d ‘done you in.’ It was the Apache, you know—and that infernal scoundrel Waldemar: he must have found out somehow,” he said excitedly. “But we’ve got it on him at last, Cleek: he’s come within the law’s reach after all.”
“To be sure; but I doubt if the law will be able to find him, Mr. Narkom. He will have left the country before the trap was actually sprung, believe me; or failing that, will be well on his way out of it.”
“But perhaps not absolutely out of it, dear chap. There are the ports, you know; and so long as he is on English soil——Come and see! Come and see! We may be able to head him off. Let’s get out by way of the front of the building, Cleek, and if I can once get to the telegraph and wire to the coast—and he hasn’t yet sailed——Come on! come on! Or no: wait a moment. That’s a constable out there, asking for information. I’ll nip out and let him know that the Yard’s on the case and give him a few orders about reporting it. Wait for me at the front door, old chap. With you in a winking.”