Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with it.  Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and over again in the coals a figure that wriggled violently and became still.  An hour after the murder, to anyone coming into the shed it would have looked exactly as if nothing remarkable had ever happened there.  Peeping presently from his engine-room the black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round, and the steam in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in the evening.  After all, from the mechanical point of view, it had been a most insignificant incident—­the mere temporary deflection of a current.  But now the slender form and slender shadow of the scientific manager replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane of light upon the vibrating floor under the straps between the engines and the dynamos.

“Have I not served my Lord?” said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow, and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear.  As he looked at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination of it that had been a little in abeyance since Holroyd’s death resumed its sway.

Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly.  The big humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from its steady beating.  It was indeed a mighty god.

The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him, scribbling on a piece of paper.  His shadow lay at the foot of the monster.

“Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry?  His servant was ready.”

Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward; then stopped.  The scientific manager suddenly stopped writing, and walked down the shed to the endmost of the dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.

Azuma-zi hesitated, and then slipped across noiselessly into the shadow by the switch.  There he waited.  Presently the manager’s footsteps could be heard returning.  He stopped in his old position, unconscious of the stoker crouching ten feet away from him.  Then the big dynamo suddenly fizzled, and in another moment Azuma-zi had sprung out of the darkness upon him.

First, the scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung towards the big dynamo, then, kicking with his knee and forcing his antagonist’s head down with his hands, he loosened the grip on his waist and swung round away from the machine.  Then the black grasped him again, putting a curly head against his chest, and they swayed and panted as it seemed for an age or so.  Then the scientific manager was impelled to catch a black ear in his teeth and bite furiously.  The black yelled hideously.

They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently slipped from the vice of the teeth or parted with some ear—­the scientific manager wondered which at the time—­tried to throttle him.  The scientific manager was making some ineffectual efforts to claw something with his hands and to kick, when the welcome sound of quick footsteps sounded on the floor.  The next moment Azuma-zi had left him and darted towards the big dynamo.  There was a splutter amid the roar.