第52章 The Azure Ring(8)

"Kennedy," he shouted frantically, "Mrs.Ralston has swallowed some of it."Kennedy seemed so intent on Vanderdyke that I had to repeat the remark.

Without looking up, he said: "Oh, one can swallow it--it's strange, but it is comparatively inert if swallowed even in a pretty good-sized quantity.I doubt if Mrs.Ralston ever heard of it before except by hearsay.If she had, she'd have scratched herself with it instead of swallowing it."If Craig had been indifferent to the emergency of Vanderdyke before, he was all action now that the confession had been made.

In an instant Vanderdyke was stretched on the floor and Craig had taken out the apparatus I had seen during the afternoon.

"I am prepared for this," he exclaimed quickly."Here is the apparatus for artificial respiration.Nott, hold that rubber funnel over his nose, and start the oxygen from the tank.Pull his tongue forward so it won't fall down his throat and choke him.I'll work his arms.Walter, make a tourniquet of your handkerchief and put it tightly on the muscles of his left arm.

That may keep some of the poison in his arm from spreading into the rest of his body.This is the only antidote known--artificial respiration."Kennedy was working feverishly, going through the motions of first aid to a drowned man.Mrs: Ralston was on her knees beside Vanderdyke, kissing his hands and forehead whenever Kennedy stopped for a minute, and crying softly.

"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.

I looked in bewilderment at the scratch on his face."How did he do it?" I asked.

Carefully Craig drew off the azure ring and examined it.In that part which surrounded the blue lapis lazuli, he indicated a hollow point, concealed.It worked with a spring and communicated with a little receptacle behind, in such a way that the murderer could give the fatal scratch while shaking hands with his victim.

I shuddered, for my hand had once been clasped by the one wearing that poison ring, which had sent Templeton, and his fiancee and now Vanderdyke himself, to their deaths.