Still holding the wireless record, Kennedy swung about to Burke and myself. "Burke, stand over by the door," he shouted. "Walter--that tank of oxygen, please."
I dragged over the heavy tank which he had ordered as he adjusted a sort of pulmotor breathing apparatus over Leon. Then I dropped back to my place beside Collette, as the oxygen hissed out.
Castine was now on his knees, his aged arms outstretched.
"Before God, Mr. Kennedy--I didn't do it. I didn't give Leon the poison!"
Kennedy, however, engrossed in what he was doing, paid no attention to the appeal.
Suddenly I saw what might have been a faint tremor of an eyelid on the pallid body before us.
I felt Collette spring forward from my side.
"He lives! He lives!" she cried, falling on her knees before the still cataleptic form. "Guillaume!"
There was just a faint movement of the lips, as though as the man came back from another world he would have called, "Collette!"
"Seize that man--it is his name signed to the wireless messages!" shouted Kennedy, extending his accusing forefinger at Aux Cayes, who had plotted so devilishly to use his voodoo knowledge both to suppress the revolution and at the same time to win his beautiful ward for himself from her real lover.
"You don't know the woman who is causing the trouble. You haven't seen her eyes. But--Madre de Dios!--my father is a changed man. Sometimes I think he is--what you call--mad!"
Our visitor spoke in a hurried, nervous tone, with a marked foreign accent which was not at all unpleasing. She was a young woman, unmistakably beautiful, of the dark Spanish type and apparently a South American.
"I am Señorita Inez de Mendoza of Lima, Peru," she introduced herself, as she leaned forward in her chair in a high state of overwrought excitement. "We have been in this country only a short time--my father and I, with his partner in a mining venture, Mr. Lockwood. Since the hot weather came we have been staying at the Beach Inn at Atlantic Beach."
She paused a moment and hesitated, as though in this strange land of the north she had no idea of which way to turn for help.
"Perhaps I should have gone to see a doctor about him," she considered, doubtfully; then her emotions got the better of her and she went on passionately, "but, Mr. Kennedy it is not a case for a doctor. It is a case for a detective--for someone who is more than a detective."