Page:Phantom-fingers-mearson.pdf/23

the shrieks of the cast, and through the curtain came the uproar of the audience. Suddenly the breath went out of Arnold, and I felt his body grow limp under me.

And suddenly I found I was struggling and pulling at the air, and that there was nothing for my hand to take hold of.

I bent over his body. His head was lying limply back in a peculiar position, as though its supports had been removed . . . I had never seen a head lie in just that fashion except once, the head of a man who had been hanged, after he was cut down with a broken neck—lifeless.

I took one look at him, and straightened up, meeting the agitated gaze of Ike Humbert.

“He’s dead,” I said.

“That’s impossible!” he almost yelled. “Why, he was alive a minute ago . . . right before our eyes . . . it could not be, no?” He looked at me for confirmation, and around at the circle of cast and stage hands who bent over the body in wonder and fear, their voices hushed and their eyes wild with a light that death only can put into the human eye.

I looked again.

“He’s dead,” I said again.

Humbert recovered himself. He was first of all a showman, and his audience was ever present in his mind. No matter what happened to his puppets, his