About them reporters circled. The foreman was relating that they had been practically unanimous for conviction, but that one of them, the twelfth, had insisted so obstinately on the poverty of the evidence that with him finally they had voted to acquit.
“But where is he?” the foreman interrupted himself to ask. “Where is the twelfth juror? Where is Durand?”
Then only was it seen that he was still in the box, crouching there, his face ashen where it was not violet, a hand held to his side.
In a moment he was surrounded. To those nearest he looked and gasped.
“Give him some brandy,” a reporter suggested. But now into the little group Peacock had forced his way. Orr edged nearer.
The juror gasped again. “I am dying,” he groaned. “It is my heart. Send for a priest. I killed him. I am the man.”
Skeptically Peacock sniffed. “You killed whom?”
“He is delirious,” the reporter exclaimed.
“I killed him,” Durand repeated.
“But whom? And why?” Peacock, bending a bit, impressed in spite of himself, inquired.
Slowly, laboriously, painfully at that, Durand from a pocket drew a picture.
“Curse him,” he muttered. “There he is. He disgraced my perle , my daughter Marie, but she wrote me where to find him and I did; I found him in the park and I shot him there, through the head, through the h-head,” he stammered and clutched at his heart.