d the street, he were
reading the advertisements on the wall.

He reached the door, and was lost in the great tide of Broadway.

I crossed to the elevator, and as I stood waiting, it descended with a
crash, and the boy who had taken my card flung himself, shrieking, into
the rotunda.

"That man--stop him!" he cried. "The man in eighty-two--he's murdered."

The clerk vaulted the desk and sprang into the street, and I dragged the
boy back to the wire rope and we shot to the third story. The boy shrank
back. A chambermaid, crouching against the wall, her face colorless,
lowered one hand, and pointed at an open door.

"In there," she whispered.

In a mean, common room, stretched where he had been struck back upon the
bed, I found the boy who had elected to meddle in the "problems of two
governments."

In tiny jets, from three wide knife-wounds, his blood flowed slowly. His
staring eyes were lifted up in fear and in entreaty. I knew that he was
dying, and as I felt my impotence to help him, I as keenly felt a great
rage and a hatred toward those who had struck him.

I leaned over him until my eyes were only a few inches from his face.

"Schnitzel!" I cried. "Who did this? You can trust me. Who did this?
Quick!"

I saw that he recognized me, and that there was something which, with
terrible effort, he was trying to make me understand.

In the hall was the rush of many people, running, exclaiming, the noise
of bells ringing; from another floor the voice of a woman shrieked
hysterically.

At the sounds the eyes of the boy grew eloquent with entreaty, and with
a movement that called from each wound a fresh outburst, like a man
strangling, he lifted his fingers to his throat.

Voices were calling for water, to wait for the doctor, to wait for the
police. But I thought I understood.

Still doubting him, still unbelieving, ashamed of my own credulity, I
tore at his collar, and my fingers closed upon a package of oiled silk.

I stooped, and with my teeth ripped it open, and holding before him the
slips of paper it contained, tore them into tiny shreds.

The eyes smiled at me with cunning, with triumph, with deep content.

It was so like the Schnitzel I had known that I believed still he might
have strength enough to help me.

"Who did this?" I begged. "I'll hang him for it! Do you hear me?" I
cried.

Seeing him lying there, with the life cut out of him, swept me with a
blind anger, with a need to punish.

"