A glance at my watch was sufficient to assure me that I should have no
time for further inquiries if I wanted to meet Kennedy before going
down to the office of Hastings. I wanted to do that, too, for I felt
sure that Craig would talk more freely to me than to the rest, and my
interest in the affair had by this time become insatiable.
Accordingly, I retraced my steps to the laboratory. Kennedy was still
at work, partly over some reactions in test-tubes, but mostly using
the strange three-tubed instrument I had noted. As I outlined to him
rapidly what I had discovered and the plain inferences to be drawn from
it, he listened attentively, still working.
“Very good,” was Kennedy’s sole comment as I concluded my story.
“That’s very interesting――possibly very important. It begins to look as
though Maddox had been in some one’s way and that that some one was
taking no chances in order to ‘get’ him.”
“What have you discovered so far?” I hesitated, not sure yet whether he
was willing to talk, for Kennedy never said anything, even to me, until
he was perfectly sure of his ground.
“Marshall Maddox was not drowned, at least,” he vouchsafed.
“Not drowned?” I repeated, more to lead him on than because I was
surprised.
“No. Whatever was the cause of his death, he was not killed by
drowning. The lungs and stomach show that. In fact, I knew at Westport
that he might have died a natural death or might even have been a
suicide. But he certainly did not die of drowning. Only more careful
tests than either the coroner or I could make at Westport were
necessary.”
“How did it happen, then?” I continued, emboldened by his apparent
readiness to talk.
Kennedy took a bottle with a ground-glass stopper and held it up so
that I could see its greenish-yellow contents. Then he pulled out the
stopper, covered with vaseline, for an instant and shoved it back again.
The instant was enough. A most unpleasant odor filled the laboratory.
I felt a sense of suffocation in the chest, an irritation in the nose
and throat, as though by the corrosive action of some gas on the air
passages.
“If we could only have seen him before he died,” continued Kennedy,
“I suspect we should have found his face as blue as it was when we
did see him, his lips violet, his pulse growing weaker until it was
imperceptible, and perhaps he would have been raising blood. It would
have been like an acute bronchitis, only worse. Look.”
From a little pin prick which he made on his own thumb Craig squeezed
out a drop of blood into a beaker containing some distilled water.
“This is a spectroscope,” he explained, touching the instrument I had
noticed. “I think you are acquainted with it in a general way. Blood in
water, diluted, shows the well-known dark bands between what we call
‘D’ and ‘E.’ These are the dark bands of oxyhemoglobin absorption.
Now, I add to this, drop by drop, the water from that bottle which
I uncorked. See――the bands gradually fade in intensity and finally
disappear, leaving a complete and brilliant spectrum devoid of any
bands whatever. In other words, here is a substance that actually
affects the red coloring matter in the blood, bleaches it out, and does
more――destroys it.”