suspecting something you entered with a policeman.  You heard him move across the floor above and fall heavily?  All right.  Someone will be down directly.  Ambulance surgeon has tried everything, you say?  No heart action, no breathing?  Sure.  Very well.  Let the body remain just where it is until I get down.  Oh, wait.  How long ago did it happen?  Fifteen minutes?  All right.  Good-bye.”

Such restoratives as we had found we applied faithfully.  At last we were rewarded by the first flutter of an eyelid.  Then Miss Guerrero gazed wildly about.

“He is dead,” she moaned.  “They have killed him.  I know it.  My father is dead.”  Over and over she repeated:  “He is dead.  I shall never see him again.”

Vainly I tried to soothe her.  What was there to say?  There could be no doubt about it.  Torreon must have gone down directly after we left Senora Mendez.  He had seen a light in the loft, had entered with a policeman—­as a witness, he had told Craig over the telephone—­had heard Guerrero fall, and had sent for the ambulance.  How long Guerrero had been there he did not know, for while members of the junta had been coming and going all day in the office below none had gone up into the locked loft.

Kennedy with rare skill calmed Miss Guerrero’s dry-eyed hysteria into a gentle rain of tears, which relieved her overwrought feelings.  We silently withdrew, leaving the two women, mistress and servant, weeping.

“Craig,” I asked when we had gained the street, “what do you make of it?  We must lose no time.  Arrest this Mendez woman before she has a chance to escape.”

“Not so fast, Walter,” he cautioned as we spun along in a taxicab.  “Our case isn’t very complete against anybody yet.”

“But it looks black for Guerrero,” I admitted.  “Dead men tell no tales even to clear themselves.”

“It all depends on speed now,” he answered laconically.

We had reached the university, which was only a few blocks away, and Craig dashed into his laboratory while I settled with the driver.  He reappeared almost instantly with some bulky apparatus under his arm, and we more than ran from the building to the near-by subway station.  Fortunately there was an express just pulling in, as we tumbled down the steps.

To one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horsecar now ambles slowly uptown, and trucks and carts all day long are in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day, and peculiarly deserted and vicious by night.  But there is another fascination about South Street.  Perhaps there has never been a revolution in Latin America which has not in some way or other been connected with this street, whence hundreds of filibustering expeditions have started.  Whenever a dictator is to be overthrown, or half a dozen chocolate-skinned generals in the Caribbean become dissatisfied with their portions of gold lace, the arms- and ammunition-dealers of South Street can give, if they choose, an advance scenario of the whole tragedy or comic opera, as the case may be.  Real war or opera-bouffe, it is all grist for the mills of these close-mouthed individuals.