The City in the Clouds

What had tickled my sense of humor was this. Stealing round from behind him, right under his very nose, so to speak, but quite unseen, was an arm which with infinite care and slowness was removing the heavy cut-glass decanter from the table. It vanished. It reappeared in the air behind him in a flashing diamond and amber circle.

"Have some whisky, Mr. Midwinter," I said, as it descended with a crash upon the side of his head.

Without a sound he sank into a huddled heap out of my sight, hidden by the table.

"You little devil!" I said, staggering to my feet, for Bill Rolston stood there, white-faced and grinning. "I had to come, Sir Thomas," he said, "it wasn't any use."

"Have you killed him, Bill?"

We bent down and made an examination. Midwinter's face was dark and suffused with blood, but his pulses were all right.

"What a pity!" said Rolston. "Help me to get him on to that chair, Sir Thomas, and we'll tie him up. If I had killed him, it would have been so much simpler!"

We dragged the unconscious man to the very armchair where I had sat under the menace of his pistol, and, tearing the tablecloth into strips, tied him securely.

"Fortunately," said Bill, "I didn't break the decanter. The stopper didn't even come out! You look pretty sick, Sir Thomas" – and indeed a horrible feeling of nausea had come over me, and my hands were shaking – "let's each have a drink and then I'll tell you what I think."

We sat down on each side of the table, and I listened to him as if the whole thing were some curious dream. For the second time I had been snatched from the very brink of death, and though I suppose I ought to have been getting used to it my only sensation was one of limpness and collapse.

"Can you do it?" my little friend said, pointing to the pistol between us.

I took it up, weighed it in my hand, half-pointed it at the stiff, red-faced figure in the chair, and laid it down again.

"No, I'm damned if I can!" I answered. And then – I must have been more than half-dazed – I actually said: "You have a go, Bill."

He looked at me in horror.

"Murder him in cold blood! I should never know a moment's peace, Sir Thomas!"

"Well, you nearly did it in hot, and you've just been tempting me – "

"Let us bring him to, if we can," he said, tactfully changing the conversation and advancing upon our friend with the siphon of soda-water.

There was a grotesque horror about the whole of our adventure that night. I laughed weakly as the soda hissed and the stream of aerated water splashed over Midwinter's face.

Before the final gurgle he awoke. His eyes opened without speculation. Then his jaw dropped. For a moment his face was as vacant as a doll's, and then it flared up into a snarl of realization and hatred, only, in another instant, to settle down into a dead calm.

"My turn now," I said.

He knew the game was up. I will do him the justice to say he did not flinch.

"Very well, count a hundred," was his answer, and his eye fell to the two pistols on the table – his own and mine.

I shook my head. "I can't do it – I wish I could!"

"You'll find it quite easy – I speak from experience," he replied, with a desperate, evil grin.

"No. I have talked the situation over with my friend. You are going to die, that is very certain, but not by my hand now, and not, Mr. Midwinter, by the hand of the English law."

He was very quick. Even then he had an inkling of my meaning, for a perceptible shadow fell over his face and his eyes narrowed to slits.

"You mean?"

"We are going to telephone to the City in the Clouds. People will come from there and take you away – that will be easily managed. You will have some form of trial, and then – execution."

I never saw a change from red to white so sudden. That big face suddenly became a hideous, sickly white, toneless and opaque like the belly of a sole.

"You won't deliver me to the Chinese?" he gasped. "You can't know them as I do. They'd take a week killing me! They have horrible secrets – "

His voice died away in a whimper, and if ever I saw a man in deadly terror, it was that man then.

But I hardened my heart. I remembered how Morse and Juanita had suffered for two years at this man's hands. I remembered four murders, to my own knowledge, and I shrugged my shoulders.

"I can't help that. You have made your bed, and you must lie upon it."

"But such a bed!" he murmured, and his head fell forward on his chest.

His arms were bound at the elbow, but he could move the lower portion, and he now brought his right hand to his face.

"I'll telephone," said Bill, and went to the wall by the door where hung the instrument.

I sat gloomily watching the man in the chair.

What was he doing? His jaw was moving up and down. He seemed biting at his wrist.

Suddenly there was a slight, tearing, ripping noise, followed by a jerk backwards of his head and a deep intake of the breath.

"What is he doing?" Rolston said, turning round with the receiver of the telephone at his ear.

Midwinter held out his arm. I saw that the braid round the cuff of his morning coat was hanging in a little strip.

"I told you I always had something in reserve," he said, showing all his teeth as he grinned at me. "Always something up my sleeve – literally, in this case. I have just swallowed a little capsule of prussic acid which – "

If you want to learn of how a man dies who has swallowed hydrocyanic acid – the correct term, I believe – consult a medical dictionary. It is not a pleasant thing to see in actual operation, but, thank heavens, it is speedy!

The sweat was pouring down my face when it was over, but Bill Rolston had not turned a hair.

"Put something over his face, Sir Thomas," he said, "and I'll get through to Mr. Morse."

ENVOI

I take up my pen this evening, exactly ten years after I wrote the last paragraph of the above narrative, to read of James Antony Midwinter, dead like a poisoned rat in his chair, with a sort of amazement in my mind.

The whole story has been locked in a safe for ten long years, and that blessed and happy time has made the wild adventures, the terrible moments in the City in the Clouds, indeed seem things far off and long ago.

This afternoon I paid what will probably be my last visit to the strange kingdom up there.

I stood with my little son, Viscount Kirby, and my small daughter, Lady Juanita, and my wife, the Countess of Stax, at a very solemn ceremony.