With these conclusions finally thrust home upon him, Jimmie Dale philosophically subordinated the matter in his mind, and, leaning back, composed himself as comfortably as he could upon his seat.  There was a man beside him, and he could feel the legs of two men on the seat facing him.  These, with the driver, would make four.  He was still well guarded!  The car itself was a closed car—­not hooded, the sense of touch told him—­therefore a limousine of some description.  These facts, in a sense inconsequential, were absorbed subconsciously; and then Jimmie Dale’s brain, remorselessly active, in spite of the pain from his throbbing head, was at work again.

It seemed as though a year had passed since, in the early evening, as Larry the Bat, he had burrowed so ironically for refuge in Chang Foo’s den—­from her!  It seemed like some mocking unreality, some visionary dream that, so short a while before, he had read those words of hers that had sent the blood coursing and leaping through his veins in mad exultation at the thought that the culmination of the years had come, that all he longed for, hoped for, that all his soul cried out for was to be his—­“in an hour.”  An hour—­and he was to have seen her, the woman whose face he had never seen, the woman whom he loved!  And the hour instead, the hours since then, had brought a nightmare of events so incredible as to seem but phantoms of the imagination.

Phantoms!  He sat up suddenly with a jerk.  The face of the dead chauffeur, the limp form lashed in that chair, the horrible picture in its entirety, every detail standing out in ghastly relief, took form before him.  God knew there was no phantom there!

The man beside him, at the sudden start, lifted a hand and felt hurriedly over the bandage across Jimmie Dale’s eyes.

Jimmie Dale was scarcely conscious of the act.  With that face before him, with the scene re-enacting itself in his mind again, had come another thought, staggering him for a moment with the new menace that it brought.  He had had neither time nor opportunity to think before; it had been all horror, all shock when he had entered that room.  But now, like an inspiration, he saw it all from another angle.  There was a glaring fallacy in the game these men had played for his benefit to-night—­a fallacy which they had counted on glossing over, as it had, indeed, been glossed over, by the sudden shock with which they had forced that scene upon him; or, failing in that, they had counted on the fact that his, or any other man’s nerve would have failed when it came to open defiance based on a supposition which might, after all, be wrong, and, being wrong, meant death.

But it was not supposition.  Either he was right now, or these men were childish, immature fools—­and, whatever else they might be, they were not that!  Not A single drop of poison had passed the chauffeur’s lips.  The man had not been murdered in that room.  He had not, in a sense, been murdered at all.  The man, absolutely, unquestionably, without a loophole for doubt, had either been killed outright in the automobile accident, or had died immediately afterward, probably without regaining consciousness, certainly without supplying any of the information that was so determinedly sought.