It was a recess to prepare another surprise for the Street,
and I had time to attend to a neglected duty.
The undertaker's shop that held the morgue looked hardly less gloomy in
the afternoon sun than in the light of breaking day in which I had left
it when I parted from Detective Coogan. The office was decorated
mournfully to accord with the grief of friends who ordered the coffins,
or the feelings of the surviving relatives on settling the bills.
"I am Henry Wilton," I explained to the man in charge. "There was a
body left here by Detective Coogan to my order, I believe."
"Oh, yes," he said: "What do you want done with it?"
I explained that I wished to arrange to have it deposited in a vault
for a time, as I might carry it East.
"That's easy done," he said; and he explained the details. "Would you
like to see the body?" he concluded. "We embalmed it on the strength of
Coogan's order."
I shrank from another look at the battered form. The awfulness of the
tragedy came upon me with hardly less force than in the moment when I
had first faced the mangled and bleeding body on the slab in the dead-
room. Again I saw the scene in the alley; again his last cry for help
rang in my ears; again I retraced the dreadful experiences of the
night, and stood in the dim horror of the morgue with the questioning
voice of the detective echoing beside me; and again did that wolf-face
rise out of the lantern-flash over the body of the man whose death it
had caused.
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