Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/310

 a hoarse whisper, but his old bravado was still there; the sneering timbre of his voice still rang as of old.

“I’ll be going now,” he was saying in his whisper, weak, but steady voiced, retaining his consciousness with the sheer power of his will. “I’ve played my last trick.” They bent over him to catch his words.

“Before I go I’d like to clear up a few things. I’ve lost, but the game was worth it.” He spoke slowly, distinctly. The sergeant in charge of the police detail left the prisoners in the hands of the three subordinates, and took down what he said on his pad.

“In the first place, as you know,” Teck smiled, cynical even in the face of death, “Peter Pomeroy had the bad grace not to die. To all intents and purposes he did die, and an hour after his death—it was sudden—the news of it went out to the papers, where it was printed the next day. He was removed to an undertaker’s chapel, where he regained consciousness that evening.”

He paused for a moment, wearied, but went on almost at once, forcing himself on, low voiced, distinct, even.

“I had him taken to my own rooms—you know them, Morley⸺” he smiled quietly. “That was when my great idea came to me. Although he regained consciousness, he had completely lost his voice and his memory. He remembered nothing, and the vocal chords were paralyzed. In some way, the news of his recovery did not get into the papers—that was the day of the great explosion in Wall Street, when so many lives were lost, and it crowded out small items of news. After that it wasn’t news any more—I fixed the undertaker, and nothing was said about it. It wasn’t hard to place an urn in a crematory and label