The Craig Kennedy Scientific Detective MEGAPACK ®. Brander Matthews
was evidently no use in trying to extract anything further from him. He had said all that medical ethics or detective skill could get from him. We thanked him and turned to the ticket window to see how long we should have to wait.
“Either that doctor doesn’t know what he is talking about or he is concealing something,” remarked Craig, as we paced up and down the platform. “I am inclined to read the enigma in the latter way.”
Nothing more passed between us during the journey back, and we hurried directly to the laboratory, late as it was. Kennedy had evidently been revolving something over and over in his mind, for the moment he had switched on the light, he unlocked one of his air-and dust-proof cabinets and took from it an instrument which he placed on a table before him.
It was a peculiar-looking instrument, like a round glass electric battery with a cylinder atop, smaller and sticking up like a safety valve. On that were an arm, a dial, and a lens fixed in such a way as to read the dial. I could not see what else the rather complicated little apparatus consisted of, but inside, when Kennedy brought near it the pole of a static electric machine two delicate thin leaves of gold seemed to fly wide apart when it was charged.
Kennedy had brought the glass tray near the thing. Instantly the leaves collapsed and he made a reading through the lens.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A radioscope,” he replied, still observing the scale. “Really a very sensitive gold leaf electroscope, devised by one of the students of Madame Curie. This method of detection is far more sensitive even than the spectroscope.”
“What does it mean when the leaves collapse?” I asked.
“Radium has been near that tray,” he answered. “It is radioactive. I suspected it first when I saw that violet color. That is what radium does to that kind of glass. You see, if radium exists in a gram of inactive matter only to the extent of one in ten-thousand million parts its presence can be readily detected by this radioscope, and everything that has been rendered radioactive is the same. Ordinarily the air between the gold leaves is insulating. Bringing something radioactive near them renders the air a good conductor and the leaves fall under the radiation.”
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed, marveling at the delicacy of it.
“Take radium water,” he went on, “sufficiently impregnated with radium emanations to be luminous in the dark, like that water of Denison’s. It would do the same. In fact all mineral waters and the so-called curarive muds like fango are slightly radioactive. There seems to be a little radium everywhere on earth that experiments have been made, even in the interiors of buildings. It is ubiquitous. We are surrounded and permeated by radiations—that soil out there on the campus, the air of this room, all. But,” he added contemplatively, “there is something different about that tray. A lot of radium has been near that, and recently.”
“How about that bandage about Haughton’s neck?” I asked suddenly. “Do you think radium could have had anything to do with that?” “Well, as to burns, there is no particular immediate effect usually, and sometimes even up to two weeks or more, unless the exposure has been long and to a considerable quantity. Of course radium keeps itself three or four degrees warmer than other things about it constantly. But that isn’t what does the harm. It is continually emitting little corpuscles, which I’ll explain some other time, traveling all the way from twenty to one hundred and thirty thousand miles a second, and these corpuscles blister and corrode the flesh like quick-moving missiles bombarding it. The gravity of such lesions increases with the purity of the radium. For instance I have known an exposure of half an hour to a comparatively small quantity through a tube, a box and the clothes to produce a blister fifteen days later. Curie said he wouldn’t trust himself in a room with a kilogram of it. It would destroy his eyesight, burn off his skin and kill him eventually. Why, even after a slight exposure your clothes are radioactive—the electroscope will show that.”
He was still fumbling with the glass plate and the various articles on it.
“There’s something very peculiar about all this,” he muttered, almost to himself.
Tired by the quick succession of events of the past two days, I left Kennedy still experimenting in his laboratory and retired, still wondering when the real clue was to develop. Who could it have been who bore the tell-tale burn? Was the mark hidden by the bandage about Haughton’s neck the brand of the stolen tubes? Or were there other marks on his body which we could not see?
No answer came to me, and I fell asleep and woke up without a radiation of light on the subject. Kennedy spent the greater part of the day still at work at his laboratory, performing some very delicate experiments. Finding nothing to do there, I went down to the Star office and spent my time reading the reports that came in from the small army of reporters who had been assigned to run down clues in the case which was the sensation of the moment. I have always felt my own lips sealed in such cases, until the time came that the story was complete and Kennedy released me from any further need of silence. The weird and impossible stories which came in not only to the Star but to the other papers surely did make passable copy in this instance, but with my knowledge of the case I could see that not one of them brought us a step nearer the truth.
One thing which uniformly puzzled the newspapers was the illness of Haughton and his enforced idleness at a time which was of so much importance to the company which he had promoted and indeed very largely financed. Then, of course, there was the romantic side of his engagement to Felicie Woods.
Just what connection Felicie Woods had with the radium robbery if any, I was myself unable quite to fathom. Still, that made no difference to the papers. She was pretty and therefore they published her picture, three columns deep, with Haughton and Denison, who were intimately concerned with the real loss in little ovals perhaps an inch across and two inches in the opposite dimension.
The late afternoon news editions had gone to press, and I had given up in despair, determined to go up to the laboratory and sit around idly watching Kennedy with his mystifying experiments, in preference to waiting for him to summon me.
I had scarcely arrived and settled myself to an impatient watch, when an automobile drove up furiously, and Denison himself, very excited, jumped out and dashed into the laboratory.
“What’s the matter?” asked Kennedy, looking up from a test tube which he had been examining, with an air for all the world expressive of “Why so hot, little man?”
“I’ve had a threat,” ejaculated Denison.
He laid on one of the laboratory tables a letter, without heading and without signature, written in a disguised hand, with an evident attempt to simulate the cramped script of a foreign penmanship.
“I know who did the Pittsburgh job. The same party is out to ruin Federal Radium. Remember Pittsburgh and be prepared!
“A STOCKHOLDER.”
“Well?” demanded Kennedy, looking up.
“That can have only one meaning,” asserted Denison.
“What is that?” inquired Kennedy coolly, as if to confirm his own interpretation.
“Why, another robbery—here in New York, of course.”
“But who would do it?” I asked.
“Who?” repeated Denison. “Some one representing that European combine, of course. That is only part of the Trust method—ruin of competitors whom they cannot absorb.”
“Then you have refused to go into the combine? You know who is backing it?”
“No—no,” admitted Denison reluctantly. “We have only signified our intent to go it alone, as often as anyone either with or without authority has offered to buy us out. No, I do not even know who the people are. They never act in the open. The only hints I have ever received were through perfectly reputable brokers acting for others.”
“Does Haughton know of this note?” asked Kennedy.
“Yes.