Page:Arthur B Reeve - The Dream Doctor.djvu/255

 lingered in the laboratory, Mr. Winslow and Mr. Strong, was not isoprene, but really ether.

"I am letting some of the odour escape here because in this very laboratory it was that the thing took place, and it is one of the well-known principles of psychology that odours are powerfully suggestive. In this case the odour now must suggest the terrible scene of the other night to some one before me. More than that, I have to tell that person that the blood transfusion did not and could not save him. His illness is due to a condition that is incurable and cannot be altered by transfusion of new blood. That person is just as doomed to-day as he was before he committed—"

A figure was groping blindly about. The arsenic compounds with which his blood was surcharged had brought on one of the attacks of blindness to which users of the drug are subject. In his insane frenzy he was evidently reaching desperately for Kennedy himself. As he groped he limped painfully from the soreness of his wound.

"Dr. Harris," accused Kennedy, avoiding the mad rush at himself, and speaking in a tone that thrilled us, "you are the man who sucked the blood of Cushing into your own veins and left him to die. But the state will never be able to exact from you the penalty of your crime. Nature will do that too soon for justice. Gentlemen, this is the murderer of Bradley Cushing, a maniac, a modern scientific vampire."

I regarded the broken, doomed man with mingled pity and loathing, rather than with the usual feelings one has toward a criminal.