trod short just in time and said:  “In truth, blood”; then selecting the place, knelt down by the body in his tall hat and respectable overcoat, his white beard giving him immense authority somehow.  “But—­this man is not dead,” he exclaimed, looking up at me.  With profound sagacity, inherent as it were in his great beard, he never took the trouble to put any questions to me and seemed certain that I had nothing to do with the ghastly sight.  “He managed to give himself an enormous gash in his side,” was his calm remark.  “And what a weapon!” he exclaimed, getting it out from under the body.  It was an Abyssinian or Nubian production of a bizarre shape; the clumsiest thing imaginable, partaking of a sickle and a chopper with a sharp edge and a pointed end.  A mere cruel-looking curio of inconceivable clumsiness to European eyes.

The old man let it drop with amused disdain.  “You had better take hold of his legs,” he decided without appeal.  I certainly had no inclination to argue.  When we lifted him up the head of Senor Ortega fell back desolately, making an awful, defenceless display of his large, white throat.

We found the lamp burning in the studio and the bed made up on the couch on which we deposited our burden.  My venerable friend jerked the upper sheet away at once and started tearing it into strips.

“You may leave him to me,” said that efficient sage, “but the doctor is your affair.  If you don’t want this business to make a noise you will have to find a discreet man.”

He was most benevolently interested in all the proceedings.  He remarked with a patriarchal smile as he tore the sheet noisily:  “You had better not lose any time.”  I didn’t lose any time.  I crammed into the next hour an astonishing amount of bodily activity.  Without more words I flew out bare-headed into the last night of Carnival.  Luckily I was certain of the right sort of doctor.  He was an iron-grey man of forty and of a stout habit of body but who was able to put on a spurt.  In the cold, dark, and deserted by-streets, he ran with earnest, and ponderous footsteps, which echoed loudly in the cold night air, while I skimmed along the ground a pace or two in front of him.  It was only on arriving at the house that I perceived that I had left the front door wide open.  All the town, every evil in the world could have entered the black-and-white hall.  But I had no time to meditate upon my imprudence.  The doctor and I worked in silence for nearly an hour and it was only then while he was washing his hands in the fencing-room that he asked: 

“What was he up to, that imbecile?”

“Oh, he was examining this curiosity,” I said.

“Oh, yes, and it accidentally went off,” said the doctor, looking contemptuously at the Nubian knife I had thrown on the table.  Then while wiping his hands:  “I would bet there is a woman somewhere under this; but that of course does not affect the nature of the wound.  I hope this blood-letting will do him good.”