Our quest took us to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer’s shop, in reality the meeting-place of the junta. By an outside stairway the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque with decades of dust.
At the door we were met by Torreon and the policeman. Both appeared to be shocked beyond measure. Torreon was profuse in explanations which did not explain. Out of the tangled mass of verbiage I did manage to extract, however, the impression that, come what might to the other members of the junta, Torreon was determined to clear his own name at any cost. He and the policeman had discovered Senor Guerrero only a short time before, upstairs. For all he knew, Guerrero had been there some time, perhaps all day, while the others were meeting downstairs. Except for the light he might have been there undiscovered still. Torreon swore he had heard Guerrero fall; the policeman was not quite so positive.
Kennedy listened impatiently, then sprang up the stairs, only to call back to the policeman: “Go call me a taxicab at the ferry, an electric cab. Mind, now, not a gasoline-cab—electric.”
We found the victim lying on a sort of bed of sailcloth in a loft apparently devoted to the peaceful purposes of the junk trade, but really a perfect arsenal and magazine. It was dusty and cobwebbed, crammed with stands of arms, tents, uniforms in bales, batteries of Maxims and mountain-guns, and all the paraphernalia for carrying on a real twentieth-century revolution.
The young ambulance surgeon was still there, so quickly had we been able to get down-town. He had his stomach-pump, hypodermic syringe, emetics, and various tubes spread out on a piece of linen on a packing-case. Kennedy at once inquired just what he had done.
“Thought at first it was only a bad case of syncope,” he replied, “but I guess he was dead some minutes before I got here. Tried rhythmic traction of the tongue, artificial respiration, stimulants, chest and heart massage—everything, but it was no use:”
“Have you any idea what caused his death?” asked Craig as he hastily adjusted his apparatus to an electric light socket—a rheostat, an induction-coil of peculiar shape, and an “interrupter.”
“Poison of some kind—an alkaloid. They say they heard him fall as they came upstairs, and when they got to him he was blue. His face was as blue as it is now when I arrived. Asphyxia, failure of both heart and lungs, that was what the alkaloid caused.”
The gong of the electric cab sounded outside. As Craig heard it he rushed with two wires to the window, threw them out, and hurried downstairs, attaching them to the batteries of the cab.
In an instant he was back again.
“Now, Doctor,” he said, “I’m going to perform a very delicate test on this man. Here I have the alternating city current and here a direct, continuous current from the storage-batteries of the cab below. Doctor, hold his mouth open. So. Now, have you a pair of forceps handy? Good. Can you catch hold of the tip of his tongue? There. Do just as I tell you. I apply this cathode to his skin in the dorsal region; under the back of the neck, and this anode in the lumbar region at the base of the spine—just pieces of cotton soaked in salt solution and covering the metal electrodes, to give me a good contact with the body.”
I was fascinated. It was gruesome, and yet I could not take my eyes off it. Torreon stood blankly, in a daze. Craig was as calm as if his every-day work was experimenting on cadavers.
He applied the current, moving the anode and the cathode slowly. I had often seen the experiments on the nerves of a frog that had been freshly killed, how the electric current will make the muscles twitch, as discovered long ago by Galvani. But I was not prepared to see it on a human being. Torreon muttered something and crossed himself.
The arms seemed half to rise—then suddenly to fall, flabby again. There was a light hiss like an inspiration and expiration of air, a ghastly sound.
“Lungs react,” muttered Kennedy, “but the heart doesn’t. I must increase the voltage.”
Again he applied the electrodes.
The face seemed a different shade of blue, I thought.
“Good God, Kennedy,” I exclaimed, “do you suppose the effect of that mescal on me hasn’t worn off yet? Blue, blue everything blue is playing pranks before my eyes. Tell me, is the blue of that face—his face—is it changing? Do you see it, or do I imagine it?”
“Blood asphyxiated,” was the disjointed reply. “The oxygen is clearing it.”
“But, Kennedy,” I persisted; “his face was dark blue, black a minute ago. The most astonishing change has taken place. Its colour is almost natural now. Do I imagine it or is it real?”
Kennedy was so absorbed in his work that he made no reply at all. He heard nothing, nothing save the slow, forced inspiration and expiration of air as he deftly and quickly manipulated the electrodes.
“Doctor,” he cried at length, “tell me what is going on in that heart.”
The young surgeon bent his head and placed his ear on the cold breast. As he raised his eyes and they chanced to rest on Kennedy’s hands, holding the electrodes dangling idly in the air, I think I never saw a greater look of astonishment on a human face. “It—is—almost—natural,” he gasped.
“With great care and a milk diet for a few days Guerrero will live,” said Kennedy quietly. “It is natural.”
“My God, man, but he was dead!” exclaimed the surgeon. “I know it. His heart was stopped and his lungs collapsed.”
“To all intents and purposes he was dead, dead as ever a man was,” replied Craig, “and would be now, if I hadn’t happened to think of this special induction-coil loaned to me by a doctor who had studied deeply the process of electric resuscitation developed by Professor Leduc of the Nantes Ecole de Medicin. There is only one case I know of on record which compares with this—a case of a girl resuscitated in Paris. The girl was a chronic morphine-eater and was ‘dead’ forty minutes.”
I stood like one frozen, the thing was so incomprehensible, after the many surprises of the evening that had preceded. Torreon, in fact, did not comprehend for the moment.
As Kennedy and I bent over, Guerrero’s eyes opened, but he apparently saw nothing. His hand moved a little, and his lips parted. Kennedy quickly reached into the pockets of the man gasping for breath, one after another. From a vest pocket he drew a little silver case, identical with that he had found in the desk up-town. He opened it, and one mescal button rolled out into the palm of his hand. Kennedy regarded it thoughtfully.
“I suspect there is at least one devotee of the vision-breeding drug who will no longer cultivate its use, as a result of this,” he added, looking significantly at the man before us.
“Guerrero,” shouted Kennedy, placing his mouth close to the man’s ear, but muting his voice so that only I could distinguish what he said, “Guerrero, where is the money?”
His lips moved trembling again, but I could not make out that he said anything.
Kennedy rose and quietly went over to detach his apparatus from the electric light socket behind