ed.

"But, my dear old Raffles, if they're still on the premises--"

The thought was too thrilling for a finished sentence.

"I hope they are," he said grimly, going to the door. "There's a gas
on! Was that burning when you came in?"

Now that I thought of it, yes, it had been.

"And there's a frightfully foul smell," I added, as I followed Raffles
down the stairs. He turned to me gravely with his hand upon the
front-room door, and at the same moment I saw a coat with an astrakhan
collar hanging on the pegs.

"They are in here, Bunny," he said, and turned the handle.

The door would only open a few inches. But a detestable odor came out,
with a broad bar of yellow gaslight. Raffles put his handkerchief to
his nose. I followed his example, signing to our ally to do the same,
and in another minute we had all three squeezed into the room.

The man with the yellow boots was lying against the door, the Count's
great carcass sprawled upon the table, and at a glance it was evident
that both men had been dead some hours. The old Camorrist had the stem
of a liqueur-glass between his swollen blue fingers, one of which had
been cut in the breakage, and the livid flesh was also brown with the
last blood that it would ever shed. His face was on the table, the
huge moustache projecting from under either leaden cheek, yet looking
itself strangely alive. Broken bread and scraps of frozen macaroni lay
upon the cloth and at the bottom of two soup-plates and a tureen; the
macaroni had a tinge of tomato; and there was a crimson dram left in
the tumblers, with an empty fiasco to show whence it came. But near
the great gray head upon the table another liqueur-glass stood,
unbroken, and still full of some white and stinking liquid; and near
that a tiny silver flash, which made me recoil from Raffles as I had
not from the dead; for I knew it to be his.

"Come out of this poisonous air," he said sternly, "and I will tell you
how it has happened."

So we all three gathered together in the hall. But it was Raffles who
stood nearest the street-door, his back to it, his eyes upon us two.
And though it was to me only that he spoke at first, he would pause
from point to point, and translate into Italian for the benefit of the
one-eyed alien to whom he owed his life.

"You probably don't even know the name, Bunny," he began, "of the
deadliest poison yet known to science. It is cyanide of cacodyl, and I
have carried that small