He recoiled, staggered, spun round and fell sprawling most
horribly--stone dead.
Waldron, at sight of this awful end, felt an uncontrollable terror sweep
over his drunk and maddened senses. Though all his blood was leaping in
his arteries, and his breath coming so fast it choked him, yet a
moment's seeming sanity possessed his reeling brain.
"The door! The door, up there!" he screamed, with a wild, terrible
curse.
Then, turning toward the ladder, in spite of his fat and flabby muscles
quivering in terrible spasms, he ran up the long steel structure with a
supreme and ape-like agility.
Fifty feet he made, seventy-five, ninety--
But, all at once, something seemed to break in his overtaxed heart.
A blackness swam before his dazzled eyes. His head fell back. Unnerved,
his fingers lost their hold. And, whirling over and over in midair, he
dropped like a plummet.
By one wall lay Flint's body. At the foot of the ladder, like a crushed
sack of bones, sprawled the corpse of "Tiger" Waldron.
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