The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
yes, I know Sato,” answered the curator, seemingly without the slightest hesitation. “He has been in Mexico—is quite a student.”
“And the other man, Otaka?”
“Other man—Otaka? You mean his wife?”
I saw Kennedy check a motion of surprise and came to the rescue with the natural question: “His wife—with a beard and mustache?”
It was Bernardo’s turn to be surprised. He looked at me a moment, then saw that I meant it, and suddenly his face lighted up.
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “that must have been on account of the immigration laws or something of the sort. Otaka is his wife. The Ainus are much sought after by the Japanese as wives. The women, you know, have a custom of tattooing mustaches on themselves. It is hideous, but they think it is beautiful.”
“I know,” I pursued, watching Kennedy’s interest in our conversation, “but this was not tattooed.”
“Well, then, it must have been false,” insisted Bernardo.
The curator chatted a few moments, during which I expected Kennedy to lead the conversation around to Senora Herreria. But he did not, evidently fearing to show his hand.
“What did you make of it?” I asked, when he had gone. “Is he trying to hide something?”
“I think he has simplified the case,” remarked Craig, leaning back, his hands behind his head, gazing up at the ceiling. “Hello, here’s Leslie! What did you find, Doctor?” The coroner had entered with a look of awe on his face, as if Kennedy had directed him by some sort of necromancy.
“It was Senora Herreria!” he exclaimed. “She has been missing from the hotel ever since late yesterday afternoon. What do you think of it?”
“I think,” replied Kennedy, speaking slowly and deliberately, “that it is very much like the Northrop case. You haven’t taken that up yet?”
“Only superficially. What do you make of it?” asked the coroner.
“I had an idea that it might be aconitin poisoning,” he said.
Leslie glanced at him keenly for a moment. “Then you’ll never prove anything in the laboratory,” he said.
“There are more ways of catching a criminal, Leslie,” put in Craig, “than are set down in the medico-legal text-books. I shall depend on you and Jameson to gather together a rather cosmopolitan crowd here tonight.”
He said it with a quiet confidence which I could not gainsay, although I did not understand. However, mostly with the official aid of Doctor Leslie, I followed out his instructions, and it was indeed a strange party that assembled that night. There were Doctor Bernardo; Sato, the curio dealer; Otaka, the Ainu, and ourselves. Mrs. Northrop, of course, could not come.
“Mexico,” began Craig, after he had said a few words explaining why he had brought us together, “is full of historical treasure. To all intents and purposes, the government says, ‘Come and dig.’ But when there are finds, then the government swoops down on them for its own national museum. The finder scarcely gets a chance to export them. However, now seemed to be the time to Professor Northrop to smuggle his finds out of the country.
“But evidently it could not be done without exciting all kinds of rumors and suspicions. Stories seem to have spread far and fast about what he had discovered. He realized the unsettled condition of the country—perhaps wanted to confirm his reading of a certain inscription by consultation with one scholar whom he thought he could trust. At any rate, he came home.”
Kennedy paused, making use of the silence for emphasis. “You have all read of the wealth that Cortez found in Mexico. Where are the gold and silver of the conquistadores? Gone to the melting pot, centuries ago. But is there none left? The Indians believe so. There are persons who would stop at nothing—even at murder of American professors, murder of their own comrades, to get at the secret.”
He laid his hand almost lovingly on his powerful little microscope as he resumed on another line of evidence.
“And while we are on the subject of murders, two very similar deaths have occurred,” he went on. “It is of no use to try to gloss them over. Frankly, I suspected that they might have been caused by aconite poisoning. But, in the case of such poisoning, not only is the lethal dose very small but our chemical methods of detection are nil. The dose of the active principle, aconitin nitrate, is about one six-hundredth of a grain. There are no color tests, no reactions, as in the case of the other organic poisons.”
I wondered what he was driving at. Was there, indeed, no test? Had the murderer used the safest of poisons—one that left no clue? I looked covertly at Sato’s face. It was impassive. Doctor Bernardo was visibly uneasy as Kennedy proceeded. Cool enough up to the time of the mention of the treasure, I fancied, now, that he was growing more and more nervous.
Craig laid down on the table the reed stick with the little darkened cylinder on the end.
“That,” he said, “is a little article which I picked up beneath Northrop’s window yesterday. It is a piece of anno-noki, or bushi.” I fancied I saw just a glint of satisfaction in Otaka’s eyes.
“Like many barbarians,” continued Craig, “the Ainus from time immemorial have prepared virulent poisons with which they charged their weapons of the chase and warfare. The formulas for the preparations, as in the case of other arrow poisons of other tribes, are known only to certain members, and the secret is passed down from generation to generation as an heirloom, as it were. But in this case it is no longer a secret. It has now been proved that the active principle of this poison is aconite.”
“If that is the case,” broke in Doctor Leslie, “it is hopeless to connect anyone directly in that way with these murders. There is no test for aconitin.”
I thought Sato’s face was more composed and impassive than ever. Doctor Bernardo, however, was plainly excited.
“What—no test—NONE?” asked Kennedy, leaning forward eagerly. Then, as if he could restrain the answer to his own question no longer, he shot out: “How about the new starch test just discovered by Professor Reichert, of the University of Pennsylvania? Doubtless you never dreamed that starch may be a means of detecting the nature of a poison in obscure cases in criminology, especially in cases where the quantity of poison necessary to cause death is so minute that no trace of it can be found in the blood.
“The starch method is a new and extremely inviting subject to me. The peculiarities of the starch of any plant are quite as distinctive of the plant as are those of the hemoglobin crystals in the blood of an animal. I have analyzed the evidence of my microscope in this case thoroughly. When the arrow poison is introduced subcutaneously—say, by a person shooting a poisoned dart, which he afterward removes in order to destroy the evidence—the lethal constituents are rapidly absorbed.
“But the starch remains in the wound. It can be recovered and studied microscopically and can be definitely recognized. Doctor Reichert has published a study of twelve hundred such starches from all sorts of plants. In this case, it not only proves to be aconitin but the starch granules themselves can be recognized. They came from this piece of arrow poison.”
Every eye was fixed on him now.
“Besides,” he rapped out, “in the soft soil beneath the window of Professor Northrop’s room, I found footprints. I have only to compare the impressions I took there and those of the people in this room, to prove that, while the real murderer stood guard below the window, he sent some one more nimble up the rain pipe to shoot the poisoned dart at Professor Northrop, and, later, to let down a rope by which he, the instigator, could gain the room, remove the dart, and obtain the key to the treasure he sought.”
Kennedy was looking straight at Professor Bernardo.
“A friend of mine in Mexico has written me about an inscription,” he burst out. “I received the letter only today. As nearly as I can gather, there was an impression that some