第81章 The Artificial Paradise(7)

We had reached the university, which was only a few blocks away, and Craig dashed into his laboratory while I settled with the driver.He reappeared almost instantly with some bulky apparatus under his arm, and we more than ran from the building to the near-by subway station.Fortunately there was an express just pulling in, as we tumbled down the steps.

To one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horsecar now ambles slowly uptown, and trucks and carts all day long are in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day, and peculiarly deserted and vicious by night.But there is another fascination about South Street.

Perhaps there has never been a revolution in Latin America which has not in some way or other been connected with this street, whence hundreds of filibustering expeditions have started.

Whenever a dictator is to be overthrown, or half a dozen chocolate-skinned generals in the Caribbean become dissatisfied with their portions of gold lace, the arms-and ammunition-dealers of South Street can give, if they choose, an advance scenario of the whole tragedy or comic opera, as the case may be.Real war or opera-bouffe, it is all grist for the mills of these close-mouthed individuals.

Our quest took us to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven-seas.On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer's shop, in reality the meeting-place of the junta.By an outside stairway the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque with decades of dust.

At the door we were met by Torreon and the policeman.Both appeared to be shocked beyond measure.Torreon was profuse in explanations which did not explain.Out of the tangled mass of verbiage I did manage to extract, however, the impression that, come what might to the other members of the junta, Torreon was determined to clear his own name at any cost.He and the policeman had discovered Senor Guerrero only a short time before, up-stairs.For all he knew, Guerrero had been there some time, perhaps all day, while the others were meeting down-stairs.

Except for the light he might have been there undiscovered still.

Torreon swore he had heard Guerrero fall; the policeman was not quite so positive.

Kennedy listened impatiently, then sprang up the stairs, only to call back to the policeman: "Go call me a taxicab at the ferry, an electric cab.Mind, now, not a gasoline-cab--electric."We found the victim lying on a sort of bed of sailcloth in a loft apparently devoted to the peaceful purposes of the junk trade, but really a perfect arsenal and magazine.It was dusty and cobwebbed, crammed with stands of arms, tents, uniforms in bales, batteries of Maxims and mountain-guns, and all the paraphernalia for carrying on a real twentieth-century revolution.

The young ambulance surgeon was still there, so quickly had we been able to get down-town.He had his stomach-pump, hypodermic syringe, emetics, and various tubes spread out on a piece of linen on a packing-case.Kennedy at once inquired just what he had done.

"Thought at first it was only a bad case of syncope," he replied, "but I guess he was dead some minutes before I got here.Tried rhythmic traction of the tongue, artificial respiration, stimulants, chest and heart massage--everything, but it was no use:""Have you any idea what caused his death?" asked Craig as he hastily adjusted his apparatus to an electric light socket--a rheostat, an induction-coil of peculiar shape, and an "interrupter.""Poison of some kind--an alkaloid.They say they heard him fall as they came up-stairs, and when they got to him he was blue.His face was as blue as it is now when I arrived.Asphyxia, failure of both heart and lungs, that was what the alkaloid caused."The gong of the electric cab sounded outside.As Craig heard it he rushed with two wires to the window, threw them out, and hurried downstairs, attaching them to the batteries of the cab.

In an instant he was back again.

"Now, Doctor," he said, "I'm going to perform a very delicate test on this man.Here I have the alternating city current and here a direct, continuous current from the storage-batteries of the cab below.Doctor, hold his mouth open.So.Now, have you a pair of forceps handy? Good.Can you catch hold of the tip of his tongue? There.Do just as I tell you.I apply this cathode to his skin in the dorsal region; under the back of the neck, and this anode in the lumbar region at the base of the spine--just pieces of cotton soaked in salt solution and covering the metal electrodes, to give me a good contact with the body."I was fascinated.It was gruesome, and yet I could not take my eyes off it.Torreon stood blankly, in a daze.Craig was as calm as if his every-day work was experimenting on cadavers.

He applied the current, moving the anode and the cathode slowly.

I had often seen the experiments on the nerves of a frog that had been freshly killed, how the electric current will make the muscles twitch, as discovered long ago by Galvani.But I was not prepared to see it on a human being.Torreon muttered something and crossed himself.

The arms seemed half to rise--then suddenly to fall, flabby again.There was a light hiss like an inspiration and expiration of air, a ghastly sound.

"Lungs react," muttered Kennedy, "but the heart doesn't.I must increase the voltage."Again he applied the electrodes.