"But perhaps you never heard the details or, if you did, you may have forgotten them. _Have_ you forgotten the details of the Charity Bazaar fire?"
Charity Bazaar fire! Three times, with increasing emphasis, the magistrate had spoken those sinister words, yet the dial gave no sign, the red column throbbed on steadily.
"I am not interested in the subject," answered the accused.
"Ah, but you are, or you ought to be. It was such a shocking affair. Hundreds burned to death, think of that! Cowardly men trampling women and children! Our noblest families plunged into grief and bereavement! Princesses burned to death! Duchesses burned to death! Beautiful women burned to death! _Rich women burned to death!_ Think of it, Groener, and--" he signaled the operator, "_and look at it!_"
As he spoke the awful tragedy began in one of those extraordinary moving pictures that the French make after a catastrophe, giving to the imitation even greater terrors than were in the genuine happening. Here before them now leaped redder and fiercer flames than ever crackled through the real Charity Bazaar; here were women and children perishing in more savage torture than the actual victims endured; here were horrors piled on horrors, exaggerated horrors, manufactured horrors, until the spectacle became unendurable, until one all but heard the screams and breathed the sickening odor of burning human flesh.
Coquenil had seen this picture in one of the boulevard theaters and, straightway, after the precious nine-second clew of the word test, he had sent Papa Tignol off for it posthaste, during the supper intermission. If the mere word "Charity Bazaar" had struck this man dumb with fear what would the thing itself do, the revolting, ghastly thing?
That was the question now, what would this hideous moving picture do to a fire-fearing assassin already on the verge of collapse? Would it break the last resistance of his overwrought nerves or would he still hold out?
Silently, intently the three men waited, bending over the dial as the test proceeded, as the fiends of torture and death swept past in lurid triumph.
The picture machine whirled on with droning buzz, the accused sat still, eyes on the sheet, the red column pulsed steadily, up and down, up and down, now a little higher, now a little quicker, but--for a minute, for two minutes--nothing decisive happened, nothing that they had hoped for; yet Coquenil felt, he knew that something was going to happen, he _knew_ it by the agonized tension of the room, by the atmosphere of _pain_ about them. If Groener had not spoken, he himself, in the poignancy of his own distress, must have cried out or stamped on the floor or broken something, just to end the silence.