exposed expanse of shirt-front was a sticky crimson smear.
"Dear—God!"
Those bullets, those hundreds of bullets, that Dmitri must have fired, during the months and years, through Stepan's chest! And somehow Peters knew, as he gazed through mercifully glazed eyes upon the horror outsplayed there, that beneath the red-drenched shirt there remained no shred of mortal flesh, but only a bleeding, bullet-blasted hole!
And on Stepan's wrists Peters saw the holes, the great fire-seared holes, the charred, circular holes the size of a half-dollar....
"Dear—God!" Peters was babbling. over and over, inanely.
Dimly, while his brain reeled and his soul retched as he gazed upon the ghastly thing on the floor, he yet realized that the same release that had, in the instant of Dmitri's passing, loosed Mary Roberts" nerves and muscles from the death-laden throes of convulsion, had also, and in that same awful instant, freed Stepan's subconscious from the enjoinment that his body was invulnerable to physical injury. And with that release had come Stepan's doom—the long-delayed death that should have been his in the instant, now perhaps years in the past, that Dmitri had first blasted a bullet through his heart.
In that moment Peters was hardly a man — he was more an animal, terrified, near mad with horror. He realized only vaguely that his hands were clenched into rigid fists, that his heart was pounding with frantic rapidity. He could feel his spine crawl and bristle; sweat, reeking with adrenal secretions, leaped from his pores.
But warningly, through waves of horror, some tiny figment of his brain was reiterating the command, "Don't let go of yourself! Don't let your nerve break!"
Slowly, then, he tore his gaze away from that horror on the floor. And, gradually, his vision cleared, his brain resumed its functioning. He had been close to madness....
He saw Ethredge, then, standing close beside the table, gazing at the horror at his feet, swaying, tottering drunkenly. Just as the Commissioner would have reeled to the floor Peters stumbled to his feet, grasped the man, guided him like a shambling cretin to a chair, fumbled in the Commissioner's hip pocket for his whisky-flask.
"Dear Lord!" Peters whispered, as he forced whisky into Ethredge's trembling mouth. "Dear Lord! if this doesn't drive him—drive her—mad——"
That horror—that horror on the floor!
But the hot, burning stimulant was bringing color back into Ethredge's face. Swiftly Peters turned to Mary, tilted her head back, poured a staggering draft down her throat. Gently he lifted her up, supported her to a chair, where she sat dazedly. Mercifully, she was in almost a comatose condition.
Ethredge was beginning to find words. "That thing—that—thing!" he was mumbling.
Incisively, then, Peters spoke. "Commissioner, you've got to get hold of yourself. We must get the medical examiner here, get Hanlon and Delaney and men from the Medical Association; we must hush this affair up. Thank God we have influence; thank God the horrors Dmitri has perpetrated on this man have been witnessed by many persons. Perhaps the story will be—a private experiment that failed, and Dmitri dead—of heart-failure. Dmitri was, after all, diabetic, and his heart was untrustworthy. But—we cannot wait; we must call Hanlon at once," He moved toward the telephone.
