He was still unconscious, gasping and fighting for breath, his features pinched and skin cold and clammy.  Kennedy examined the stricken man carefully, first feeling his pulse.  It was barely perceptible, rapid, thready, and irregular.  Now and then there were muscular tremblings and convulsive movements of the limbs.  Craig moved over to the side of the room away from the two girls, where Doctor Scott was standing.

“Sometimes,” I heard the doctor venture, “I think it is aconite, but the symptoms are not quite the same.  Besides, I don’t see how it could have been administered.  There’s no mark on him that might have come from a hypodermic, no wound, not even a scratch.  He couldn’t have swallowed it.  Suicide is out of the question.  But his nose and throat are terribly swollen and inflamed.  It’s beyond me.”

I tried to recall other cases I had seen.  There was one case of Kennedy’s in which several deaths had occurred due to aconite.  Was this another of that sort?  I felt unqualified to judge, where Doctor Scott himself confessed his inability.  Kennedy himself said nothing, and from his face I gathered that even he had no clue as yet.

As we left the sick-room, we found that another visitor had arrived and was standing in the sitting-room.  It was Manuel Sandoval.

Sandoval was a handsome fellow, tall, straight as an arrow, with bushy dark hair and a mustache which gave him a distinguished appearance.  Born in Cuba, he had been educated in the United States, had taken special work in the technology of sugar, knew the game from cane to centrifugal and the ship to the sugar trust.  He was quite as much a scientist as a business man.

He and Eulalie talked for a moment in low tones in Cuban Spanish, but it needed only to watch his eyes to guess where his heart was.  He seemed to fairly devour every move that Anitra made about the apartment.

A few minutes later the door opened again and a striking-looking man entered.  He was a bit older than Sandoval, but still young.  As he entered he bowed to Sandoval and Eulalie but greeted Anitra warmly.

“Mr. Burton Page,” introduced Anitra, turning to us quickly, with just the trace of a flush on her face.  “Mr. Page has been putting my brother in touch with people in New York who are interested in Cuban sugar-plantations.”  A call from Doctor Scott for some help took both girls into the sick-room for a moment.

“Is Barrios any better?” asked Page, turning to Sandoval.

Sandoval shook his head in the negative, but said nothing.  One could not help observing that there seemed to be a sort of antipathy between the two, and I saw that Craig was observing them both closely.

Page was a typical, breezy Westerner, who had first drifted to New York as a mining promoter.  Prom that he had gone into selling ranches, and, by natural stages, into the promotion of almost anything in the universe.