The next moment Latimer, Tommy, and I were kneeling round the prostrate figure of the doctor. We lifted him up very gently and turned him over on to his back, using a rolled-up rug as a pillow for his head. He had been shot through the right lung and was bleeding at the mouth.
Latimer bent over and made a brief examination of the wound. Then with a slight shake of his head he knelt back.
"I'm afraid there's no hope," he remarked dispassionately. "It's a pity. We might have got some useful information out of him."
There was a short pause, and then quite suddenly the dying man opened his eyes. It may have been fancy, but it seemed to me that for a moment a shadow of the old mocking smile flitted across his face. His lips moved, faintly, as though he were trying to speak. I bent down to listen, but even as I did so there came a fresh rush of blood into his throat, and with a long shudder that strange sinister spirit of his passed over into the darkness. I shall always wonder what it was that he left unsaid.
CHAPTER XXIV
EXONERATED
It was Tommy who pronounced his epitaph. "Well," he observed, "he was a damned scoundrel, but he played a big game anyhow."
Latimer thrust his hand into the dead man's pocket, and drew out a small nickel-plated revolver. One chamber of it was discharged.
"Not a bad shot," he remarked critically. "Fired at me through his coat, and only missed my head by an inch."
He got up and looked round the room at the shattered window and the other traces of the fray, his gaze coming finally to rest on the prostrate figure of Savaroff.