n out of sight at the engine furnace until
he heard a difference in the noise from the dynamo. It was not a
difficult examination, being untinctured by suspicion.

The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician
removed from the machine, were hastily covered by the porter with
a coffee-stained tablecloth. Somebody, by a happy inspiration,
fetched a medical man. The expert was chiefly anxious to get the
machine at work again, for seven or eight trains had stopped midway
in the stuffy tunnels of the electric railway. Azuma-zi, answering
or misunderstanding the questions of the people who had by
authority or impudence come into the shed, was presently sent back
to the stoke-hole by the scientific manager. Of course a crowd
collected outside the gates of the yard--a crowd, for no known
reason, always hovers for a day or two near the scene of a sudden
death in London; two or three reporters percolated somehow into the
engine-shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the scientific
expert cleared them out again, being himself an amateur journalist.

Presently the body was carried away, and public interest
departed with it. Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace,
seeing over and over again in the coals a figure that wriggled
violently and became still. An hour after the murder, to anyone
coming into the shed it would have looked exactly as if nothing had
ever happened there. Peeping presently from his engine-room the
black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside his little
brothers, and the driving wheels were beating round, and the steam
in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in
the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view, it had
been a most insignificant incident--the mere temporary deflection
of a current. But now the slender form and slender shadow of the
scientific manager replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd
travelling up and down the lane of light upon the vibrating floor
under the straps between the engines and the dynamos.

"Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his
shadow, and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear.
As he looked at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination
of it that had been a little in abeyance since Holroyd's death,
resumed its sway.

Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and
pitilessly. The big humming machine had slain its victim without
wavering for a second from its stead