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“Oh, I’m doing about as well as could be expected under the circumstances. I think I'll live, if that’s what you mean.” He felt his throat with a tender and speculative hand. “No bones broken, I guess. A windpipe or so badly bent, but otherwise everything seems to be present or accounted for.”

There was a sigh of relief from Humbert. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “I thought for a moment that you were done for, just like poor” . . . he hesitated at the name, but finally supplied it . . . “Arnold. What did it feel like, what?”

“Like being hanged,” said Cunningham. “I don’t expect ever to come any closer to being hanged without actually going through with it. I thought there was no hand that could do that to me—”

“You felt a hand?” queried Betty Sargent.

“Felt a hand? I'll say I did! I can still feel it, if you want to know. Another minute, and if it hadn’t been for Muirhead here, I would have been saying: ‘Good morning, St. Peter,’ and complaining because my harp wasn’t first quality. Ill never get any nearer to death . . . and come back.” He glanced at my dagger.

“Certainly looks as though it was a flesh and blood hand, doesn’t it,” I read his thought.

“Certainly does. And it felt like one, too,” contributed Cunningham. “And, by the way, Mr. Hum-