We dashed down the last corridor and were brought up by a stout door. Pu-Yi bent down to the handle, turned it gently, and--it opened. We tiptoed into that room. Directly I was over the threshold, the spiritual odor of death, of violent death, came to me. A fire of logs was still burning redly upon the hearth. For the rest the room was lit only by its skylight, through which filtered a dirty and opaque illumination which was only sufficient to give every object a shape of the sinister or bizarre. The red glow from the fire glistened upon the polished screen of steel which divided the room into two portions. And it also fell, redly, upon something else. This was the corpse of Mulligan. It was seated in a chair which had been pulled up to the screen with its back towards it, as if in mockery and derision of its power to keep it. He had been strangled by a yard of catgut, twisted, tourniquet-fashion, by a piece of stick at the back of the neck. The catgut had sunk far into the flesh, reducing the neck to less than half its ordinary size, and the great staring head hung down upon one shoulder. One of the logs in the grate fell with a crackle of sparks. For the rest, dead silence. "They have come," Pu-Yi said simply. "But what has happened?" I whispered, my throat was so dry that the sound was like the rustling of paper. "I shall know soon. I am going to find out. There is not a minute to lose. Can you, dare you, wait here--" I nodded and he was out of the room in a flash. Upon the dead man's table was the usual array of bottles and glasses. I took some brandy and gulped it down and my brain cleared instantly. There was a little touch of infinite pathos even in this hideous moment, for by the side of an empty glass I saw a string of beads with a little metal crucifix. The Irishman, a Roman Catholic of course, must have been saying his prayers some time before he met his end. Somehow the thought comforted me and gave me power to act. I found a knife, and cut the bonds that tied the giant to the chair. I lowered him reverently to the floor and finally severed the horrible ligature around his throat. An examination of the steel door in the screen of bars showed that it was securely locked, but the bunch of keys which the dead man usually carried upon a chain was no longer there--the end of the chain dangled from his trousers pocket. While I was doing these things a most deadly apprehension was standing specter-like by my side and plucking with wan fingers at my sleeve. What had happened, what might even now be happening at the Palacete Mendoza? Pu-Yi whirled into the room. He made no noise, it was as though a dried leaf had been blown in by the wind. His face was transformed. Every outline was sharpened, and the color was changed until it bore the exact resemblance to a mask of green bronze. In its frozen immobility it was dead, yet awfully alive, and the eyes glittered like little crumbs of diamond. "Well?"