"Just got your wire," said the voice, "and I think we've got your man. Picked him up on the street last night, unconscious. Hospital people say he's suffering from poisoning of some kind and don't expect him to live. Keeps raving about diamonds and some one he calls 'Marsh.' Papers on him show he came into San Francisco two days ago on the Manu. Won't tell his name, but has mentioned Cape Town several times."
"Right!" cried Preston. "Watch him carefully until I get there. I'll make the first train out."
That afternoon Preston, accompanied by two chiefs of police, made his way into a little room off the public ward in the hospital in Sacramento. In bed, his face drawn and haggard until the skin seemed like parchment stretched tightly over his cheekbones, lay a man at the point of death—a man who was only kept alive, according to the physicians, by some almost superhuman effort of the will.
"It's certain that he's been poisoned," said the doctor in charge of the case, "but he won't tell us how. Just lies there and glares and demands a copy of the latest newspaper. Every now and then he drifts off into delirium, but just when we think he's on the point of death he recovers."
Motioning to the others to keep in the background, Preston made his way to the bedside of the dying man. Then, bending forward, he said, very clearly and distinctly: "Marshall Montgomery is dead!"
Into the eyes of the other man there sprang a look of concentrated hatred that was almost tangible—a glare that turned, a moment later, into supreme relief.
"Thank God!" he muttered. "Now I'm ready to die!"
"Tell me," said Preston, quietly—"tell me what made you do it."
"He did!" gasped the man on the bed. "He and his damned brutality. When I knew him his name was Marsh. We dug for diamonds together in South Africa—found them, too—enough to make us both rich for life. But our water was running low—barely enough for one of us. He, the skunk, hit me over the head and left me to die—taking the water and the stones with him."
He paused a moment, his breath rattling in his throat, and then continued: