"Schuyler, poor boy, I wonder how you could have done it. I was
with him that day. We rode up in his car, and as we passed
through Williston he said he would stop a minute and wish
Templeton luck. I didn't think it strange, for he said he had
nothing any longer against Laura Wainwright, and Templeton only
did his duty as a lawyer against us. I forgave John for
prosecuting us, but Schuyler didn't, after all. Oh, my poor boy,
why did you do it? We could have gone somewhere else and started
all over again--it wouldn't have been the first time."
At last came the flutter of an eyelid and a voluntary breath or
two. Vanderdyke seemed to realise where he was. With a last
supreme effort he raised his hand and drew it slowly across his
face. Then he fell back, exhausted by the effort.
But he had at last put himself beyond the reach of the law. There
was no tourniquet that would confine the poison now in the
scratch across his face. Back of those lack-lustre eyes he heard
and knew, but could not move or speak. His voice was gone, his
limbs, his face, his chest, and, last, his eyes. I wondered if it
were possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that
endured by a mind which so witnessed the dying of one organ after
another of its own body, shut up, as it were, in the fulness of
life, within a corpse.
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