them an ordinary door-lock or window-catch is no protection. With a
jimmy eighteen inches long even an anaemic burglar can exert a pressure
sufficient to lift two tons. Not one window in a thousand can stand
that strain. The only use of locks is to keep out sneak-thieves and
compel the modern scientific educated burglar to make a noise. But
making a noise isn’t enough here, at night. This place with all its
fabulous treasures must be guarded constantly, now, every hour, as if
the front door were wide open.”
The bars replaced and the window apparently locked as before, Craig
devoted his efforts to examining the packing cases in the basement. As
yet apparently nothing down there had been disturbed. But while
rummaging about, from an angle formed behind one of the cases he drew
forth a cane, to all appearances an ordinary Malacca walking-stick. He
balanced it in his hand a moment, then shook his head.
“Too heavy for a Malacca,” he ruminated. Then an idea seemed to occur
to him. He gave the handle a twist. Sure enough, it came off, and as it
did so a bright little light flashed up.
“Well, what do you think of that?” he exclaimed. “For a scientific
dark-lantern that is the neatest thing I have ever seen. An electric
light cane, with a little incandescent lamp and a battery hidden in it.
This grows interesting. We must at last have found the cache of a real
gentleman burglar such as Bertillon says exists only in books. I wonder
if he has anything else hidden back here.”
He reached down and pulled out a peculiar little instrument—a single
blue steel cylinder. He fitted a hard rubber cap snugly into the palm
of his hand, and with the first and middle fingers encircled the
cylinder over a steel ring near the other end.
A loud report followed, and a vase, just unpacked, at the opposite end
of the basement was shattered as if by an explosion.
“Phew!” exclaimed Kennedy. “I didn’t mean to do that. I knew the thing
was loaded, but I had no idea the hair-spring ring at the end was so
delicate as to shoot it off at a touch. It’s one of those aristocratic
little Apache pistols that one can carry in his vest pocket and hide in
his hand. Say, but that stung! And back here is a little box of
cartridges, too.”
We looked at each other in amazement at the chance find. Apparently the
vandal had planned a series of visits.
“Now, let me see,” resumed Kennedy. “I suppose our very human but none
the less mysterious intruder expected to use these again. Well, let him
try. I’ll put them back here for the present. I want to watch in the
art-gallery to-night.”
I could not help wondering whether, after all, it might not be an
inside job and the fixing of the window merely a blind. Or was the
vandal fascinated by the subtle influence of mysticism that so often
seems to emanate from objects that have come down from the remote ages
of the world? I could not help asking myself whether the story that
Miss White had told was absolutely true. Had there been anything more
than superstition in the girl’s evident fright? She had seen something,
I felt sure, for it was certain she was very much disturbed. But what
was it she had really seen? So far all that Kennedy had found had
proved that the reincarnation of the priestess Ka had been very
material. Perhaps the “reincarnation” had got in in the daytime and had
spent the hours until night in the mummy-case. It might well have been
chosen as the safest and least suspicious hiding-place.
Kennedy evidently had some ideas and plans, for no sooner had he
completed arrangements with Dr. Lith so that we could get into the
museum that night to watch, than he excused himself. Scarcely around
the corner on the next business street he hurried into a telephone
booth.
“I called up First Deputy O’Connor,” he explained as he left the booth
a quarter of an hour later. “You know it is the duty of two of
O’Connor’s men to visit all the pawn-shops of the city at least once a
week, looking over recent pledges and comparing them with descriptions
of stolen articles. I gave him a list from that catalogue of Dr. Lith’s
and I think that if any of the emeralds, for instance, have been pawned
his men will be on the alert and will find it out.”
We had a leisurely dinner at a near-by hotel, during most of which time
Kennedy gazed vacantly at his food. Only once did he mention the case,
and that was almost as if he were thinking aloud.
“Nowadays,” he remarked, “criminals are exceptionally well informed.
They used to steal only money and jewels; to-day it is famous pictures
and antiques also. They know something about the value of antique
bronze and marble. In fact, the spread of a taste for art has taught
the enterprising burglar that such things are worth money, and he, in
turn, has educated up the receivers of stolen goods to pay a reasonable
percentage of the value of his artistic plunder. The success of the
European art thief is enlightening the American thief. That’s why I
think we’ll find some of this stuff in the hands of the professional
fences.”
It was still early in the evening when we returned to the museum and
let ourselves in with the key that Dr. Lith had loaned Kennedy. He had
been anxious to join us in the watch, but Craig had diplomatically
declined, a circumstance that puzzled me and set me thinking that
perhaps he suspected the curator himself.
We posted ourselves in an angle where we could not possibly be seen
even if the full force of the electrolier were switched on. Hour after
hour we waited. But nothing happened. There were strange and weird
noises in plenty, not calculated to reassure one, but Craig was always
ready with an explanation.
It was in the forenoon of the day after our long and unfruitful vigil
in the art-gallery that Dr. Lith himself appeared at our apartment in a
great state of perturbation.
“Miss White has disappeared,” he gasped, in answer to Craig’s hurried
question. “When I opened the museum, she was not there as she is
usually. Instead, I found this note.”
He laid the following hastily written message on the table:
Do not try to follow me. It is the green curse that has
pursued me from Paris. I cannot escape it, but I may prevent
it from affecting others.
LUCILLE WHITE.
That was all. We looked at each other at a loss to understand the
enigmatic wording—“the green curse.”
“I rather expected something of the sort,” observed Kennedy. “By the
way, the shoenails were French, as I surmised. They show the marks of
French heels. It was Miss White herself who hid in the mummy-case.”
“Impossible,” exclaimed Dr. Lith incredulously. As for myself, I had
learned that it was of no use being incredulous with Kennedy.
A moment later the door opened, and one of O’Connor’s men came in
bursting with news. Some of the emeralds had been discovered in a Third
Avenue pawn-shop. O’Connor, mindful of the historic fate of the Mexican
Madonna and the stolen statue of the Egyptian goddess Neith, had
instituted a thorough search with the result that at least part of the
pilfered jewels had been located. There was only one clue to the thief,
but it looked promising. The pawnbroker described him as “a crazy
Frenchman of an artist,” tall, with a pointed black beard. In pawning
the jewels he had given the name of Edouard Delaverde, and the city
detectives were making a canvass of the better known studios in hope of
tracing him.
Kennedy, Dr. Lith and myself walked around to the boarding-house where
Miss White lived. There was nothing about it, from the landlady to the
gossip, to distinguish it from scores of other places of the better
sort. We had no trouble in finding out that Miss White had not returned
home at all the night before. The landlady seemed to look on her as a
woman of mystery, and confided to us that it was an open secret that
she was not an American at all, but a French girl whose name, she
believed, was really Lucille Leblanc—which, after all, was White.
Kennedy made no comment, but I wavered between the conclusions that she
had been the victim of foul play and that she might be the criminal
herself, or at least a member of a band of criminals.
No trace of her could be found through the usual agencies for locating
missing persons. It was the middle of the afternoon, however, when word
came to us that one of the city detectives had apparently located the
studio of Delaverde. It was coupled with the interesting information
that the day before a woman roughly answering the description of Miss
White had been seen there. Delaverde himself was gone.
The building to which the detective took us was down-town in a
residence section which had remained as a sort of little eddy to one
side of the current of business that had swept everything before it
up-town. It was an old building and large, and was entirely given over
to studios of artists.
Into one of the cheapest of the suites we were directed. It was almost
bare of furniture and in a peculiarly shiftless state of disorder. A
half-finished picture stood in the centre of the room, and several
completed ones were leaning against the wall. They were of the wildest
character imaginable. Even the conceptions of the futurists looked tame
in comparison.
Kennedy at once began rummaging and exploring. In a corner of a
cupboard near the door he disclosed a row of dark-colored bottles. One
was filled halfway with an emerald-green liquid.
He held it up to the light and read the label, “Absinthe.”
“Ah,” he exclaimed with evident interest, looking first at the bottle
and then at the wild, formless pictures. “Our crazy Frenchman was an
absintheur. I thought the pictures were rather the product of a
disordered mind than of genius.”
He replaced the bottle, adding: “It is only recently that our own
government placed a ban on the importation of that stuff as a result of
the decision of the Department of Agriculture that it was dangerous to
health and conflicted with the pure food law. In France they call it
the ‘scourge,’ the ‘plague,’ the ‘enemy,’ the ‘queen of poisons.’
Compared with other alcoholic beverages it has the greatest toxicity of
all. There are laws against the stuff in France, Switzerland, and
Belgium. It isn’t the alcohol alone, although there is from fifty to
eighty per cent. in it, that makes it so deadly. It is the absinthe,
the oil of wormwood, whose bitterness has passed into a proverb. The
active principle absinthin is a narcotic poison. The stuff creates a
habit most insidious and difficult to break, a longing more exacting
than hunger. It is almost as fatal as cocaine in its blasting effects
on mind and body.
“Wormwood,” he pursued, still rummaging about, “has a special affinity
for the brain-cells and the nervous system in general. It produces a
special affliction of the mind, which might be called absinthism. Loss
of will follows its use, brutishness, softening of the brain. It gives
rise to the wildest hallucinations. Perhaps that was why our absintheur
chose first to destroy or steal all things green, as if there were some
merit in the colour, when he might have made away with so many more
valuable things. Absintheurs have been known to perform some of the
most intricate manoeuvres, requiring great skill and the use of
delicate tools. They are given to disappearing, and have no memory of
their actions afterward.”
On an ink-spattered desk lay some books, including Lombroso’s
“Degenerate Man” and “Criminal Woman.” Kennedy glanced at them, then at
a crumpled manuscript that was stuck into a pigeonhole. It was written
in a trembling, cramped, foreign hand, evidently part of a book, or an
article.
“Oh, the wickedness of wealth!” it began. “While millions of the poor
toilers slave and starve and shiver, the slave-drivers of to-day, like
the slave-drivers of ancient Egypt, spend the money wrung from the
blood of the people in useless and worthless toys of art while the
people have no bread, in old books while the people have no homes, in
jewels while the people have no clothes. Thousands are spent on dead
artists, but a dollar is grudged to a living genius. Down with such
art! I dedicate my life to righting the wrongs of the proletariat. Vive
l’anarchism!”
The thing was becoming more serious. But by far the most serious
discovery in the now deserted studio was a number of large glass tubes
in a corner, some broken, others not yet used and standing in rows as
if waiting to be filled. A bottle labelled “Sulphuric Acid” stood at
one end of a shelf, while at the other was a huge jar full of black
grains, next a bottle of chlorate of potash. Kennedy took a few of the
black grains and placed them on a metal ash-tray. He lighted a match.
There was a puff and a little cloud of smoke.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “black gunpowder. Our absintheur was a bomb-maker,
an expert perhaps. Let me see. I imagine he was making an explosive
bomb, ingeniously contrived of five glass tubes. The centre one, I
venture, contained sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash separated by a
close-packed wad of cotton wool. Then the two tubes on each side
probably contained the powder, and perhaps the outside tubes were
filled with spirits of turpentine. When it is placed in position, it is
so arranged that the acid in the center tube is uppermost and will thus
gradually soak through the cotton wool and cause great heat and an
explosion by contact with the potash. That would ignite the powder in
the next tubes, and that would scatter the blazing turpentine, causing
a terrific explosion and a widespread fire. With an imperative idea of
vengeance, such as that manuscript discloses, either for his own wrongs
as an artist or for the fancied wrongs of the people, what may this
absintheur not be planning now? He has disappeared, but perhaps he may
be more dangerous if found than if lost.”
VIII
THE MUMMY CASE
The horrible thought occurred to me that perhaps he was not alone. I
had seen Spencer’s infatuation with his attractive librarian. The
janitor of the studio-building was positive that a woman answering her
description had been a visitor at the studio. Would she be used to get
at the millionaire and his treasures? Was she herself part of the plot
to victimise, perhaps kill, him? The woman had been much of an enigma
to me at first. She was more so now. It was barely possible that she,
too, was an absintheur, who had shaken off the curse for a time only to
relapse into it again.
If there were any thoughts like these passing through Kennedy’s mind he
did not show it, at least not in the shape of hesitating in the course
he had evidently mapped out to follow. He said little, but hurried off
from the studio in a cab up-town again to the laboratory. A few minutes
later we were speeding down to the museum.
There was not much time for Craig to work if he hoped to be ready for
anything that might happen that night. He began by winding coil after
coil of copper wire about the storeroom in the basement of the museum.
It was not a very difficult matter to conceal it, so crowded was the
room, or to lead the ends out through a window at the opposite side
from that where the window had been broken open.
Up-stairs in the art-gallery he next installed several boxes such as
those which I had seen him experimenting with during his tests of
selenium on the afternoon when Mr. Spencer had first called on us. They
were camera-like boxes, about ten inches long, three inches or so wide,
and four inches deep.
One end was open, or at least looked as though the end had been shoved
several inches into the interior of the box. I looked into one of the
boxes and saw a slit in the wall that had been shoved in. Kennedy was
busy adjusting the apparatus, and paused only to remark that the boxes
contained two sensitive selenium surfaces balanced against two carbon
resistances. There was also in the box a clockwork mechanism which
Craig wound up and set ticking ever so softly. Then he moved a rod that
seemed to cover the slit, until the apparatus was adjusted to his
satisfaction, a delicate operation, judging by the care he took.
Several of these boxes were installed, and by that time it was quite
late.
Wires from the apparatus in the art-gallery also led outside, and these
as well as the wires from the coils down in the basement he led across
the bit of garden back of the Spencer house and up to a room on the top
floor. In the upper room he attached the wires from the storeroom to
what looked like a piece of crystal and a telephone receiver. Those
from the art-gallery terminated in something very much like the
apparatus which a wireless operator wears over his head.
Among other things which Craig had brought down from the laboratory was
a package which he had not yet unwrapped. He placed it near the window,
still wrapped. It was quite large, and must have weighed fifteen or
twenty pounds. That done, he produced a tape-measure and began, as if
he were a surveyor, to measure various distances and apparently to
calculate the angles and distances from the window-sill of the Spencer
house to the skylight, which was the exact centre of the museum. The
straight distance, if I recall correctly, was in the neighborhood of
four hundred feet.
These preparations completed, there was nothing left to do but to wait
for something to happen. Spencer had declined to get alarmed about our
fears for his own safety, and only with difficulty had we been able to
dissuade him from moving heaven and earth to find Miss White, a
proceeding which must certainly have disarranged Kennedy’s carefully
laid plans. So interested was he that he postponed one of the most
important business conferences of the year, growing out of the
anti-trust suits, in order to be present with Dr. Lith and ourselves in
the little upper back room.
It was quite late when Kennedy completed his hasty arrangements, yet as
the night advanced we grew more and more impatient for something to
happen. Craig was apparently even more anxious than he had been the
night before, when we watched in the art-gallery itself. Spencer was
nervously smoking, lighting one cigar furiously from another until the
air was almost blue.
Scarcely a word was spoken as hour after hour Craig sat with the
receiver to his ear, connected with the coils down in the storeroom.
“You might call this an electric detective,” he had explained to
Spencer. “For example, if you suspected that anything out of the way
was going on in a room anywhere this would report much to you even if
you were miles away. It is the discovery of a student of Thorne Baker,
the English electrical expert. He was experimenting with high-frequency
electric currents, investigating the nature of the discharges used for
electrifying certain things. Quite by accident he found that when the
room on which he was experimenting was occupied by some person his
measuring-instruments indicated that fact. He tested the degree of
variation by passing the current first through the room and then
through a sensitive crystal to a delicate telephone receiver. There was
a distinct change in the buzzing sound heard through the telephone when
the room was occupied or unoccupied. What I have done is to wind single
loops of plain wire on each side of that room down there, as well as to
wind around the room a few turns of concealed copper wire. These
collectors are fitted to a crystal of carborundum and a telephone
receiver.”
We had each tried the thing and could hear a distinct buzzing in the
receiver.
“The presence of a man or woman in that room would be evident to a
person listening miles away,” he went on. “A high-frequency current is
constantly passing through that storeroom. That is what causes that
normal buzzing.”
It was verging on midnight when Kennedy suddenly cried: “Here, Walter,
take this receiver. You remember how the buzzing sounded. Listen. Tell
me if you, too, can detect the change.”
I clapped the receiver quickly to my ear. Indeed I could tell the
difference. In place of the load buzzing there was only a mild sound.
It was slower and lower.
“That means,” he said excitedly, “that some one has entered that
pitch-dark storeroom by the broken window. Let me take the receiver
back again. Ah, the buzzing is coming back. He is leaving the room. I
suppose he has found the electric light cane and the pistol where he
left them. Now, Walter, since you have become accustomed to this thing
take it and tell me what you hear.”
Craig had already seized the other apparatus connected with the
art-gallery and had the wireless receiver over his head. He was
listening with rapt attention, talking while he waited.
“This is an apparatus,” he was saying, “that was devised by Dr.
Fournier d’Albe, lecturer on physics at Birmingham University, to aid
the blind. It is known as the optophone. What I am literally doing now
is to HEAR light. The optophone translates light into sound by means of
that wonderful little element, selenium, which in darkness is a poor
conductor of electricity, but in light is a good conductor. This
property is used in the optophone in transmitting an electric current
which is interrupted by a special clockwork interrupter. It makes light
and darkness audible in the telephone. This thing over my head is like
a wireless telephone receiver, capable of detecting a current of even a
quarter of a microampere.”
We were all waiting expectantly for Craig to speak. Evidently the
intruder was now mounting the stairs to the art-gallery.
“Actually I can hear the light of the stars shining in through that
wonderful plate glass skylight of yours, Mr. Spencer,” he went on. “A
few moments ago when the moon shone through I could hear it, like the
rumble of a passing cart. I knew it was the moon both because I could
see that it must be shining in and because I recognised the sound. The
sun would thunder like a passing express-train if it were daytime now.
I can distinguish a shadow passing between the optophone and the light.
A hand moved across in front of it would give a purring sound, and a
glimpse out of a window in daylight would sound like a cinematograph
reeling off a film.
“Ah, there he is.” Craig was listening with intense excitement now.
“Our intruder has entered the art-gallery. He is flashing his electric
light cane about at various objects, reconnoitring. No doubt if I were
expert enough and had had time to study it, I could tell you by the
sound just what he is looking at.”
“Craig,” I interrupted, this time very excited myself, “the buzzing
from the high-frequency current is getting lower and lower.”
“By George, then, there is another of them,” he replied. “I’m not
surprised. Keep a sharp watch. Tell me the moment the buzzing increases
again.”
Spencer could scarcely control his impatience. It had been a long time
since he had been a mere spectator, and he did not seem to relish being
held in check by anybody.
“Now that you are sure the vandal is there,” he cut in, his cigar out
in his excitement, “can’t we make a dash over there and get him before
he has a chance to do any more damage? He might be destroying thousands
of dollars’ worth of stuff while we are waiting here.”
“And he could destroy the whole collection, building and all, including
ourselves into the bargain, if he heard so much as a whisper from us,”
added Kennedy firmly.
“That second person has left the storeroom, Craig,” I put in. “The
buzzing has returned again full force.”
Kennedy tore the wireless receiver from his ear. “Here, Walter, never
mind about that electric detective any more, then. Take the optophone.
Describe minutely to me just exactly what you hear.”
He had taken from his pocket a small metal ball. I seized the receiver
from him and fitted it to my ear. It took me several instants to
accustom my ears to the new sounds, but they were plain enough, and I
shouted my impressions of their variations. Kennedy was busy at the
window over the heavy package, from which he had torn the wrapping. His
back was toward us, and we could not see what he was doing.
A terrific din sounded in my ears, almost splitting my ear-drums. It
was as though I had been suddenly hurled into a magnified cave of the
winds and a cataract mightier than Niagara was thundering at me. It was
so painful that I cried out in surprise and involuntarily dropped the
receiver to the floor.