ANNIHILATION
McCarty stumbled forward and took the envelope held out to him, turning
to the window where he bent forward for the rush of cool air to play
over his face. It was addressed simply to: “Ex-Roundsman McCarty” and
the second line read: “Delivered by hand.” Slitting it open he glanced
quickly down the few lines it contained and then at his companions.
“’Tis for all of us, I’m thinking,” he said. “Listen!
“‘My dear McCarty. It has been a pleasure to meet such a man as you
and we part with regret, at least on my side. You are quite correct in
your deductions as far as you have expounded them and I regret that
I cannot wait to hear you reconstruct your complete case but time
presses. The last drawer of this desk at which I write has a false
bottom; remove it and you will find a portion of my diary for the past
fortnight, placed there in readiness for this eventuality. I bequeath
it to you for your further information and in most sincere admiration,
for where I go I may take nothing material with me, although I shall
not leave my body behind. I am not going to death but to annihilation.
Checkmate!
“‘Henry Orbit.’”
“What does he mean?” the inspector demanded. “What kind of an escape
has he planned? Not take his body with him and yet not leave it
behind? What’s that about ‘annihilation’?”
“We may know for ourselves if we stand here guessing about it instead
of stopping him!” McCarty thrust the letter into his pocket and made
for the door beyond which the two French servants and the Chinese one
had halted. “He’s planned to destroy himself entirely, body and all,
and if it’s by blowing the whole house up I’d not be surprised! Come
on!”
The others hurried after him but in the hall he paused to confront
Ching Lee.
“’Twas the man you worked for, Orbit, who was the murderer!” he
announced. “You knew that, though; you suspected it from the first,
after the queer way Hughes took sick from drinking the medicine Orbit
mixed for him before dinner! That’s why you went next morning dressed
like a Chinese laborer down to the quarter where Hughes died, to get
what dope you could about it! If you don’t want to get pinched for
being accessory, you come clean! Which way did he go just now?”
“I did not see.” Ching Lee’s face had betrayed no slightest flicker of
emotion and his tone was perfectly composed. “I came upstairs only when
the shouts and the odor of smoke led me to think that the house was on
fire. I saw no one, nothing.”
“Where is his laboratory? Where is it that he locks himself away
sometimes, a place that none of the rest of you enters?” McCarty rapped
out the questions like shots from an automatic. “There’s not a minute
to spare! Is it upstairs or down?”
Ching Lee was silent, but Jean with chattering teeth spoke up suddenly:
“It is upstairs! I see him when I reach the head of the staircase. He
rush’ from that room through all the smoke and he is laughing! Then he
mount to the next floor and on above, and in the attic there is a room
which none but he may enter, which he guards with a heavy steel door—!”
“Show us where it is!” McCarty ordered. “That’s where I fell down. I
might have figured that a guy with his brains would have looked out for
everything, even failure, and planned a way out for himself!”
He started on a shambling trot for the back stairs, with the others
crowding after, but Jean slipped past him and leaped up three steps at
a time. Past the guest rooms and servants’ quarters to the storerooms
and the attic above the searchers hurried, pausing only before a small
wooden door.
“I thought you said ’twas made of steel!” McCarty turned the handle and
then put his shoulder to a panel. “We’ll have to break through.”
“It is but the false one, the cover,” explained Jean. “Just beyond is
the real door of steel.”
“You’re sure he came this way? There’s nowhere else he could be
hiding?” McCarty glanced at the Frenchman and then turned to his
companions. “Stand back! We’ll have this down!”
But the small door was stouter than it looked and it required the
combined efforts of Dennis and one of the officials as well before it
yielded and crashed inward, only to lean, as Jean had said, against a
second door a foot or two beyond, which presented to their impatient
gaze a solid sheet of tempered steel.
“We’d never get through that except with soup and God knows
what’s beyond it that would blow us all into the next world!”
McCarty exclaimed. “Inspector, will you ’phone for an expert from
headquarters? There’s nothing to do but wait. We know where he is,
though; that’s some comfort!”
The inspector hurried downstairs and the others grouped themselves
before the wall of steel separating them from that which lay on the
other side, after clearing away the débris of the wrecked door.
“There’s not a sound from in there!” Dennis moved over to McCarty.
“What’s he doing, do you suppose? Fixing a train of powder, belike?”
“He is not!” McCarty responded. “If he’d meant to blow us up he’d have
done it down in his sitting-room instead of turning that infernal smoke
on us. He must have had that all fixed and ready to blind us, so that
he could make whatever kind of a getaway he’d arranged. You couldn’t
hear a cannon go off behind that solid steel, but whatever he’s doing,
’tis only to himself; you’ll mind the letter he wrote me? He wouldn’t
have spoke of his diary unless he intended us to read it and it’s all
part and parcel of his character, Denny. He couldn’t bear to go without
the world knowing how clever he was!”
“‘Clever!’” Dennis shuddered. “But what did he do it all for, Mac?
You asked him that when you accused him and he didn’t answer. He’d no
reason and yet he wasn’t crazy! He’d such a grand manner and a way of
making you feel like the scum of the earth in his presence without even
trying to, that I would never have suspected him in the world! How you
came to guess it is beyond me!”
“I’d the key to it all right from the start, only I didn’t know it!”
McCarty responded as the inspector bounded up the stairs. “I’m only
disgusted that the truth didn’t come to me sooner, and maybe the
little lad and the nurse Lucette would have been spared.”
“Two of the best men in the department are on their way!” the inspector
announced. “I had to stop to send in a second call for reserves to hold
back the crowd that’s trying to storm the gates, for the news has got
out somehow! Martin and Yost sent in the first call but the boys who
responded can do no more with that mob than a one-armed sheriff in a
riot!—Any sign from in there?”
The officials shook their heads and Jean remarked:
“I have seen once, when he goes in and does not know that I am near to
him. Before he close the door I think that I see others still beyond
this, but they are open and at the end is a room with shelves covered
with bottles and glass tubes of a strange shape. On the floor is a
great round tank of some metal higher than one’s head! I think then
that he is perhaps a scientist, a great man! It is only after Hughes
die and then the little Horace disappear that I begin to think he is a
demon!—Here is André.”
The stout chef had labored up the stairs and behind him the flowing
robes of Ching Lee moved like a shadow.
“You shall get him?” the former demanded. “You shall put him in that
chair of electricity? _Parbleu!_ When I think of the little Lucette so
pretty and good, and the little Horace, I could run my knives through
his heart! It is I who give him with these hands the glass of milk with
which he drugs the little Horace and then I watch while that mountain
of coal descend into the chute and I suspect nothing! It is only when
my countrywoman die there before him and they say it is the poison gas
that I think of this room and the so horrible odors which come from it
when he open the door!”
“When did you see him come here last?” McCarty asked.
“On the afternoon of Wednesday, but a half hour before he cry out for
help from the conservatory where Lucette dies!” He spread out his small
fat hands in an expressive gesture. “I think it is to this room that he
comes for I am in mine with the door a little open and he pass quickly
and without sound; going up the stairs. He carries something round and
blue on the end of a stick and I think that I must be mistake’ for it
appears like the toy balloon of a child! Nevertheless I watch and in a
so short time, a few minutes, he comes down again, still carrying the
balloon. I tell of it to Ching Lee later but he has not seen it in the
conservatory and he does not believe.”
“Look here, Ching Lee, why didn’t you tell somebody what you knew?”
McCarty addressed the Chinaman who stood aside, silent and seemingly
impassive. “Why did you let Orbit go on with his crimes when a word to
us would have put him where he could do no more harm?”
“Mr. Orbit is rich, of a great family and power in high places, and—he
is a white man.” Ching Lee responded in his unemotional singsong tones.
“I too am of high degree and not without honor in my own land but I was
forced to leave it and here I am a poor man, a servant without friends
or influence—and I am yellow. Who would believe my word against his
when I had no proof? I would have been cast into your prison but even
there Mr. Orbit would have reached me and silenced my tongue. There
was the little Fu Moy to consider, my nephew who is to be educated and
go back with much to teach my people; I could not leave him without
protection. I could only wait for you, who are white men, too, to see
what lay before your eyes.”
“There’s something in that!” McCarty conceded. “Isn’t that the bell? If
it’s the men we’ve sent for bring them right up.”
“It is possible that he have shoot himself before we arrive here,”
remarked Jean. “There is a pistol which he keeps always in a drawer
of the little table beside his bed and to-day when he thrust me aside
at the door of the card-room to rush out and learn why all those men
with shovels have come I feel it in his hip pocket as he pushes his
way past. It is loaded always; that I know, for more than once I have
looked at it.”
Dennis glanced questioningly at McCarty who shook his head.
“He’s taking his body with him where he’s gone,” he reminded the other
in an undertone. “He’ll not do that with the shot of a gun!”
Ching Lee reappeared with the two experts armed with tools and bags.
After a cursory examination of the steel door one of the latter turned
to the inspector.
“Can’t be done in less than an hour unless we take a chance and blow it
off, and you said there might be explosives behind it that would wreck
the block,” he announced. “I don’t promise to do it in that time but
we’ll work as fast as we can.”
“Let’s go and have a look at that diary in the meantime,” suggested
McCarty. “Jean thinks there are more doors beyond like this one and it
may be night before they’re open! The boys can let us know when they’ve
got through.”
“All right.” The inspector turned, addressing the two officials. “Want
to come along? If it really is his diary, it ought to be about the
strangest document that ever fell into the hands of the department.”
With a few minor directions to the rest he led the way back to the
sitting-room and closed the door. The air was now quite clear of smoke
and only a faint, noisome odor lingered behind.
McCarty seated himself in the chair lately occupied by Orbit himself
and drew out the last drawer of the desk. It was filled with open
envelopes bearing cancelled stamps and he scattered them on the floor
in his haste to empty it.
“He told the truth about the false bottom,” he announced. “I can feel
it give but I wonder how does it open?”
One of the officials stepped forward.
“Shall I try, Mac?” he asked. “I was a custom house inspector years ago
and there isn’t a smuggler’s dodge I’m not on to; that either lifts or
slides and there may be a spring.”
“Go to it,” McCarty acquiesced briefly, and the other complied.
“Look here, Mac!” The inspector looked up suddenly. “Who chloroformed
Orbit the other night?”
McCarty chuckled.
“He did, himself! I got that the minute I saw the bottle, for there
wasn’t enough gone from it to put a kitten out! The towel was soaked,
but with water, and he’d just sprinkled enough chloroform on it to
smell. He didn’t want to lose his wits, you see, only to make us think
he was unconscious so he could get a line on what we were after and
hear our talk. He must have heard us coming up the stairs and looked
out or else doped out that it would be us, for it was Denny and me that
broke in that night. He paid me a return call the next and rigged up a
gun to shoot me in the dark, but I found it first and fired it through
the roof!”
“’Twas that I heard!” Dennis exclaimed. “Glory be! Well I knew you
were too old a hand to let it go off accidental, like you told me, but
little I thought you’d been near murdered, or I’d not have left you,
duty or no duty—!”
“There you are!” The detective lieutenant rose from his knees with the
false bottom of the drawer in his hand. “It was a new one on me after
all, but I managed to work it. There’s a lot of papers underneath that
look as though they’d been torn from a blankbook and they’re covered
with writing.”
“It’s Orbit’s!” McCarty gathered the loose sheets up and spread them on
the desk before him. “Do you mind when he wrote that list for me here
in this very room, of the guests he’d had during the last few months?
The writing is the same, and ’tis dated; it looks like the diary, all
right! Do you want to read it, inspector? I’m not much good at it, and
if he uses as big words as he talks with—!”
Inspector Druet took the pages from him and seated himself near the
window. For a long moment he sat silent glancing over the papers and as
he read his face darkened and then paled. Then with a sudden start he
looked over to McCarty.
“My God, this is frightful! The man was the greatest wretch that ever
lived! He must have been mad, of course, but listen! This is dated
the thirteenth; that would be a week ago last Monday.—‘I succeeded in
making it to-day from the formula and tried it on the white kitten
from next door. The result was amazing! If it had been known a few
years ago the history of the war would have been changed! If I could
only experiment with it on a human, what a magnificent way it would be
for me to learn the thrill of that last experience that awaits me! To
take the place of providence, to play at fate, to make destiny! The
longing haunts me, I cannot rest, I must know that ultimate sensation
of power! I can’t use the gas, though; I don’t need to see the death
I bring about and it must come far from the house. It will have to be
the Calabar bean after all, but whom shall I choose? Not André, his
soufflées are admirable, and Jean is the only servant who ever dusted
my room and left things where I could find them; not Fu Moy or Ching
Lee, for one never knows with these silent, yellow people when revenge
will come. Hughes’ services are invaluable to me but he is a dead loss
to society, it might even be benefited by his removal. I must decide!’”
“That was it!” McCarty nodded. “The longing for power, to feel that
he was the biggest man in the world; ambition with a warped turn to
it! ’Twas nothing but the lust of killing born in him that he wouldn’t
admit even to himself!—But go on, sir. What’s the next?”
“Two days later, the fifteenth; that was Wednesday. He says: ‘It must
be Hughes. The neighbors are still amusing after their fashion and
I could not be sure they would go outside of the Mall immediately.
Physostigmine is soluble in alcohol; I could put a grain or two in
wine and leave it about but that will not do. I must give it to Hughes
with my own hand. I shall have to await my opportunity, then give him
a drink and send him on an errand to a strange part of town. I cannot
wait!’—That’s all of that entry and the next one is midnight after
the murder.—‘It is done! Hughes is dead and I have killed him! I
could shout, sing, dance as wildly as a savage about a pyre and yet
I am strangely calm, like a god! I am a god, for I hold the power
of life and death, I know what it is at last! The only drawback was
that it was too easy; Hughes has been dissipating lately and it gave
me an idea to-night. I mixed some bitters together with a dash of
absinthe—just enough for one dose—added two grains of the powdered
bean and put it in an old tonic bottle. When Hughes came to lay out
my things for dinner I told him he looked badly, needed more air and
exercise and persuaded him to go out and take a long walk, breathing
deeply. Then I gave him the drink I had prepared,—poured it out for
him myself and watched it pass with a gurgle down his gross, fat neck!
I looked at him when he put down the glass and could not realize that
it was actually accomplished! The man standing there before me was a
dead man even though he still moved and talked and probably thought of
his dinner, and it was I who had done this! It had rested in my hands
whether he should live or die and I had condemned and executed him! I
shall never forget that moment of exquisite exhilaration, the ecstasy
of omnipotence! But I was discreet, I controlled myself. I warned
Hughes that the medicine might make him feel a trifle ill, might even
restrict his breathing but he must walk it off and he would be greatly
benefited. He actually thanked me—thanked me for bringing death upon
him! All the evening while Goddard and the Sloanes were here, I kept
my triumph to myself but nothing could withstand my sense of power.
My bridge was unsurpassed—I knew that—and I played the organ as I
never have played before!—And then it came, that for which I had been
waiting. Three blockheads from the police arrived to tell me of Hughes’
death!’”
McCarty chuckled grimly.
“Fu Moy overheard that conversation and told me about it only
to-day—between Orbit and Hughes, I mean, about the medicine. He don’t
say anything about the fire after, does he?”
Dennis looked up quickly as the inspector glanced ahead and nodded:
“Here it is.—‘There was only one flaw in this magic evening. I used the
powdered bean from the smaller box and it was just enough. I did not
open the other, forgetting how long it had been since its contents had
been exposed to the air, but thrust it down in a seam of the cushioned
chair and almost immediately after I had gone downstairs spontaneous
combustion occurred.’”
“What-t!” Dennis sat forward tensely, and McCarty chuckled again.
“I tried to read you that about Calabar bean in that article we had
at the fire house yesterday afternoon but you wouldn’t listen!” he
said. “I didn’t know what was this spontaneous combustion at all, till
you happened to explain this morning, little thinking what was on my
mind!... But what else does Orbit say about it?”
“He goes on: ‘Fu Moy discovered it and Ching Lee put it out.
Fortunately they did not find the box of Calabar bean.’—He raves on
again about his feeling of power, glorying in it, but that is all.”
The inspector slipped the page aside and glanced at the next. “This
is dated Sunday, the nineteenth. ‘The police were active yesterday
but they are quite at sea. I have no fear that they will discover
anything, although the one called McCarty seems to be possessed of a
certain amount of native shrewdness and logic. No uproarious comedy
has ever been so excruciatingly amusing as this investigation but I am
maintaining my pose of regretful employer of a worthy servant. I only
wish that I could have used the gas; I made a fresh supply to-day only
to be compelled to dissipate it unused. It is maddening! The death of
Hughes has not satisfied this craving but intensified it. Death by
violence, death that I may experience the sensation of having caused
it, while it is taking place—I hunger for it!’”
The shadows were lengthening in the room and the cries of the mob
outside the gates had subsided to a sullen murmur. In the moment of
silence that followed the inspector’s reading of the paragraph, soft,
slippered feet padded along the hall and Ching Lee stood before them.
“The door has been opened,” he announced. “There is a second steel
one behind it, even stronger than the first, but the men are trying a
different acid and drill.”
“Very well, Ching Lee. Turn on the lights, will you?” The inspector
motioned toward the switch and in an instant the room was flooded with
a brilliant glow from the low lamps scattered all about. “Tell the men
to be as quick as they can, and let me know when they have finished; no
one is to enter that room until we come.”
The butler bowed and turning went up the stairs again. McCarty eyed the
papers still remaining in the inspector’s hands.
“Is there any entry in the diary for Monday?”
“Only this, but it means a lot, considering what came later: ‘Ching
Lee reminded me that the coal has not been ordered this season. The
dust from it is horrible, defiling my flowers and soiling everything. I
shall not arrange for it until frost has come. Yet there is something
fascinating, relentless, about the way it rushes down the chute like
a miniature, sable avalanche. If we were pigmies, what death it could
deal!’—Oh, there’s no doubt about it, Mac; the man is unquestionably
mad!”
“His ancestors weren’t; not all of them, at any rate!” McCarty
responded grimly. “If the next that he’s written is on Tuesday night,
it’ll be after Horace was killed.”
“It is!” Inspector Druet’s voice shook with loathing. “This is
the most damnable thing, Mac! He must have sat in that very chair
where you are now, gloating over it as he wrote!—‘Once more I have
usurped the prerogative of providence! I have taken a useless, sickly
life, foredoomed to failure because it lacked the stamina to combat
difficulties. Weakness! the only sin in the world! Had Horace Goddard
lived he would have profaned art with mediocrity and as I look at the
masterpieces about me I rejoice that his poor efforts are destined
never to see the light,—destined because I so willed it, I am destiny!
It was the luminal that put the thought into my mind, although I had
no idea then whom I should remove. I forgot I possessed any till I
looked over the store in my laboratory this morning. Two grains of
that innocent looking coal tar product would bring oblivion in twenty
minutes and the coma would last for two or three hours, during which
time death might be brought about in a dozen different ways! I played
with the thought, it fascinated me, and I could fix my mind on nothing
else, although Giambattista was coming to play this afternoon. If I
could only know once more those intoxicating moments of last Friday
night!
“‘It was, then, just after lunch, that Horace slipped over to ask if
he might study my Fragonard for a little while. He came by way of the
side door and none of the servants had seen him. I realized this and
as I looked at him it came to me what a really unnecessary life his
was, except in the fatuous eyes of his parents! What a subject for that
coal tar product—and then I thought of the coal itself, that Ching
Lee had spoken about yesterday. How easy it would be to render Horace
insensible and bury him under an avalanche of coal!
“‘I could not resist the idea, it took possession of me! I coaxed the
boy up to my sitting-room, induced him to drink a glass of milk in
which I dropped two miraculous grains of luminal, and then I went and
telephoned the coal-dealer. If he could not deliver, the boy would wake
none the worse and my plan would only be deferred, but the order went
through and when I rejoined him Horace was already drowsy. I shall
never forget the exquisite agony of suspense during that half-hour.
Horace slept at last and although I had to call the coal-dealer twice
more my plan succeeded! I carried Horace to the cellar unseen and just
in time, for the coal arrived and the crash of it tumbling down the
chute was like the roll of maddening drums! To hear it was enough, I
did not want to see, and I was again in my sitting-room spraying the
black dust from my flowers when the man McCarty and his associate were
ushered in. I am not quite sure about McCarty; I have not underrated
him, he is the type of the one-time policeman, elemental, phlegmatic,
devoted to routine and without initiative, and yet he seemed to-day to
be studying me!’”
“He had me right!” McCarty grinned. “’Twas what I went there for!”
“And me thinking you were stalling, and not getting it at all!” Dennis
shook his head. “He’d a grand opinion of himself, all right, but a
poorly-read one of you, Mac!”
“Orbit goes on to mention Trafford’s call to inquire for Horace while
you were here.” The inspector had been reading ahead. “Then he starts
on to rave about the musicale and how he felt with the lad’s body under
his very feet; he says that at the organ he surpassed Giambattista
on the violin and he was drunk with what he had pulled off all the
evening.”
“He played all by himself later,” McCarty observed. “A funny, childish
little tune and yet with something threatening and malicious about it,
and whilst Denny was getting shaved this morning I found out what it
was—a witch’s song from an opera called ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ after the
crone has lured children to her house and made away with them! That
ought to have told me something if I’d known what it was!”
“He says nothing of planning another murder, does he?” Dennis asked.
“He must have run wild when he committed one the very next day—!”
“The laboratory is open now, sir.” Ching Lee had reappeared so
noiselessly that he seemed to have sprung into being on the threshold.
“No one is there.”
“No one!” The inspector started up with a cry, cramming the papers into
his pocket. “My God, he has escaped, after all!”
“I don’t think so, sir,” McCarty demurred gravely. “Perhaps the men
didn’t see him, but—we’d better lose no time!”
They sprang up the stairs and passed the two great steel doors swinging
idly on twisted hinges, into a long, low room, looking very much as
Jean had described it. The closed cupboards below the shelving were too
small to have held a human body and there was no other hiding place
nor any way of egress save the door by which they had entered.
“We’ve been done, Mac!” the inspector exclaimed again, ruefully.
“Unless the boys outside caught him, we’ll have a long chase on our
hands!”
“No.” McCarty stood looking up meditatively at the huge circular vat
which occupied the center of the floor and rose for six or seven feet
like a miniature gas tank. “Give me that step-ladder, will you, Denny?
I want to see is this empty.”
“By the smell of it, it’s not!” Dennis commented. “’Tis worse than
asafœtida!”
He brought the ladder and McCarty ascended cautiously and peered over
the top. The vat appeared to be almost filled with some thick, murky
liquid with an oily film floating on the surface. When he had stared
down into it for some minutes he descended, his ruddy face pale and
tinged with greenish shadows.
“Mac!” Dennis caught him solicitously as he reeled. “It’s sick you are!
Come away out of this! Orbit’s not here!”
“If I’m sick it’s from my own thoughts, Denny!” McCarty replied
shakily. “Where does that pipe lead to from the bottom of the vat?”
“To that huge receptacle over there.” It was the detective lieutenant
who answered, pointing. “It’s to draw off whatever might be in there, I
guess.”
“Turn the cock, then, will you?” McCarty sat down suddenly and held his
head in his hands. “I want to see the bottom of that vat!”
The inspector looked startled and Dennis stared but they made no
comment and one official mounted the ladder while the other turned the
cock. There was a gurgle and then a swishing rush as the liquid poured
into the slender, solid pipe.
“It’s going down,” the man on the ladder announced. “Whatever this
greasy stuff is, it’s slipping through the pipe, all right! What do you
think is at the bottom of it, Mac?”
“I’m not wanting to think of it till I have to!” McCarty groaned. “Sing
out if—if it stops running out before the vat’s empty.”
But the official, did not “sing out” and the waiting seemed
interminable. At last, after the longest half-hour that any of them had
known, he announced:
“Vat’s quite empty, Mac! Except for scum it’s as clean as the floor!
There’s six little things that look like pebbles rolling around in it,
though; shall I climb down and get them?”
“For heaven’s sake, no!” McCarty sprang to his feet. “’Tis sudden death
and a horrible one, if you so much as touch the stuff that’s left
there! Go and ask André for a lead spoon from the kitchen, and mind
it’s lead!”
The man obeyed and McCarty threw off his coat, climbed the ladder, and
perched on the rim of the vat, while Dennis uttered agonized warnings
from below. Then he drew up the ladder, planted it firmly inside
the vat and when the detective returned with the required spoon he
descended carefully to the lowest rung and scooped up the six gray
pellets from the slime of the bottom.
When he had climbed over and down once more, guarding his find with the
utmost caution the others gathered around him and he shuddered as he
addressed the inspector.
“That vat is lined with lead, sir; nothing else but lead could hold
that stuff for it eats everything away as if it hadn’t even been! You
notice that ladder was purposely fixed with lead tips to the feet of
it or it would have melted under me! I’ve heard of it but I never saw
it before. It’s hydrofluoric acid. ’Twill go through steel and rock
and—and flesh and bone, and leave no sign! Do you get me?”
“I do, but it’s horrible!” The inspector shivered. “You mean that
Orbit—! Was that what he meant by ‘annihilation’?”
McCarty nodded.
“You’ll mind there’s only one thing can resist it and that’s lead. This
is all that is left of Henry Orbit—the six bullets from his revolver!”