replied Mr. Winslow. “He is a man of about forty, I should say, and is
reputed to own a majority of the—”
“Oh, father,” interrupted Miss Winslow, who had caught the drift of the
conversation in spite of the pains that had been taken to keep it away
from her, “Mr. Borland would never dream of such a thing. It is wrong
even to think of it.”
“I didn’t say that he would, my dear,” corrected Mr. Winslow gently.
“Professor Kennedy asked me who was chiefly interested in the rubber
works and Mr. Borland owns a majority of the stock.” He leaned over and
whispered to Kennedy, “Borland is a visitor at our home, and between
you and me, he thinks a great deal of Ruth.”
I looked quickly at Kennedy, but he was absorbed in looking out of the
car window at the landscape which he did not and could not see.
“You said there were others who had an interest in outside companies,”
cross-questioned Kennedy. “I take it that you mean companies dealing in
crude rubber, the raw material, people with investments in plantations
and concessions, perhaps. Who are they? Who were the men who went on
that expedition to the Congo with Borland which you mentioned?”
“Of course, there was Borland himself,” answered Winslow. “Then there
was a young chemist named Lathrop, a very clever and ambitious fellow
who succeeded Cushing when he resigned from the works, and Dr. Harris,
who was persuaded to go because of his friendship for Borland. After
they took up the concession I believe all of them put money into it,
though how much I can’t say.”
I was curious to ask whether there were any other visitors at the
Winslow house who might be rivals for Ruth’s affections, but there was
no opportunity.
Nothing more was said until we arrived at Goodyear.
We found the body of Cushing lying in a modest little mortuary chapel
of an undertaking establishment on the main street. Kennedy at once
began his investigation by discovering what seemed to have escaped
others. About the throat were light discolourations that showed that
the young inventor had been choked by a man with a powerful grasp,
although the fact that the marks had escaped observation led quite
obviously to the conclusion that he had not met his death in that way,
and that the marks probably played only a minor part in the tragedy.
Kennedy passed over the doubtful evidence of strangulation for the more
profitable examination of the little gash in the wrist.
“The radial artery has been cut,” he mused.
A low exclamation from him brought us all bending over him as he
stooped and examined the cold form. He was holding in the palm of his
hand a little piece of something that shone like silver. It was in the
form of a minute hollow cylinder with two grooves on it, a cylinder so
tiny that it would scarcely have slipped over the point of a pencil.
“Where did you find it?” I asked eagerly.
He pointed to the wound. “Sticking in the severed end of a piece of
vein,” he replied, half to himself, “cuffed over the end of the radial
artery which had been severed, and done so neatly as to be practically
hidden. It was done so cleverly that the inner linings of the vein and
artery, the endothelium as it is called, were in complete contact with
each other.”
As I looked at the little silver thing and at Kennedy’s face, which
betrayed nothing, I felt that here indeed was a mystery. What new
scientific engine of death was that little hollow cylinder?
“Next I should like to visit the laboratory,” he remarked simply.
Fortunately, the laboratory had been shut and nothing had been
disturbed except by the undertaker and his men who had carried the body
away. Strong had left word that he had gone to Boston, where, in a safe
deposit box, was a sealed envelope in which Cushing kept a copy of the
combination of his safe, which had died with him. There was, therefore,
no hope of seeing the assistant until the morning.
Kennedy found plenty to occupy his time in his minute investigation of
the laboratory. There, for instance, was the pool of blood leading back
by a thin dark stream to the workbench and its terrible figure, which I
could almost picture to myself lying there through the silent hours of
the night before, with its life blood slowly oozing away, unconscious,
powerless to save itself. There were spurts of arterial blood on the
floor and on the nearby laboratory furniture, and beside the workbench
another smaller and isolated pool of blood.
On a table in a corner by the window stood a microscope which Cushing
evidently used, and near it a box of fresh sterilised slides. Kennedy,
who had been casting his eye carefully about taking in the whole
laboratory, seemed delighted to find the slides. He opened the box and
gingerly took out some of the little oblong pieces of glass, on each of
which he dropped a couple of minute drops of blood from the arterial
spurts and the venous pools on the floor.
Near the workbench were circular marks, much as if some jars had been
set down there. We were watching him, almost in awe at the matter of
fact manner in which, he was proceeding in what to us was nothing but a
hopeless enigma, when I saw him stoop and pick up a few little broken
pieces of glass. There seemed to be blood spots on the glass, as on
other things, but particularly interesting to him.
A moment later I saw that he was holding in his hand what were
apparently the remains of a little broken vial which he had fitted
together from the pieces. Evidently it had been used and dropped in
haste.
“A vial for a local anesthetic,” he remarked. “This is the sort of
thing that might be injected into an arm or leg and deaden the pain of
a cut, but that is all. It wouldn’t affect the consciousness or prevent
any one from resisting a murderer to the last. I doubt if that had
anything directly to do with his death, or perhaps even that this is
Cushing’s blood on it.”
Unlike Winslow I had seen Kennedy in action so many times that I knew
it was useless to speculate. But I was fascinated, for the deeper we
got into the case, the more unusual and inexplicable it seemed. I gave
that end of it up, but the fact that Strong had gone to secure the
combination of the safe suggested to me to examine that article. There
was certainly no evidence of robbery or even of an attempt at robbery
there.
“Was any doctor called?” asked Kennedy.
“Yes,” he replied. “Though I knew it was of no use I called in Dr.
Howe, who lives up the street from the laboratory. I should have called
Dr. Harris, who used to be my own physician, but since his return from
Africa with the Borland expedition, he has not been in very good health
and has practically given up his practice. Dr. Howe is the best
practising physician in town, I think.”
“We shall call on him to-morrow,” said Craig, snapping his watch, which
already marked far after midnight. Dr. Howe proved, the next day, to be
an athletic-looking man, and I could not help noticing and admiring his
powerful frame and his hearty handshake, as he greeted us when we
dropped into his office with a card from Winslow.
The doctor’s theory was that Cushing had committed suicide.
“But why should a young man who had invented a new method of
polymerising isoprene, who was going to become wealthy, and was engaged
to a beautiful young girl, commit suicide?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. It was evident that he, too,
belonged to the “natural rubber set” which dominated Goodyear.
“I haven’t looked into the case very deeply, but I’m not so sure that
he had the secret, are you?”
Kennedy smiled. “That is what I’d like to know. I suppose that an
expert like Mr. Borland could tell me, perhaps?”
“I should think so.”
“Where is his office?” asked Craig. “Could you point it out to me from
the window?”
Kennedy was standing by one of the windows of the doctor’s office, and
as he spoke he turned and drew a little field glass from his pocket.
“Which end of the rubber works is it?”
Dr. Howe tried to direct him but Kennedy appeared unwarrantably obtuse,
requiring the doctor to raise the window, and it was some moments
before he got his glasses on the right spot.
Kennedy and I thanked the doctor for his courtesy and left the office.
We went at once to the office of Dr. Harris, to whom Winslow had also
given us cards. We found him an anaemic man, half asleep. Kennedy
tentatively suggested the murder of Cushing.
“Well, if you ask me my opinion,” snapped out the doctor, “although I
wasn’t called into the case, from what I hear, I’d say that he was
murdered.”
“Some seem to think it was suicide,” prompted Kennedy.
“People who have brilliant prospects and are engaged to pretty girls
don’t usually die of their own accord,” rasped Harris.
“So you think he really did have the secret of artificial rubber?”
asked Craig.
“Not artificial rubber. Synthetic rubber. It was the real thing, I
believe.”
“Did Mr. Borland and his new chemist Lathrop believe it, too?”
“I can’t say. But I should surely advise you to see them.” The doctor’s
face was twitching nervously.
“Where is Borland’s office?” repeated Kennedy, again taking from his
pocket the field glass and adjusting it carefully by the window.
“Over there,” directed Harris, indicating the corner of the works to
which we had already been directed.
Kennedy had stepped closer to the window before him and I stood beside
him looking out also.
“The cut was a very peculiar one,” remarked Kennedy, still adjusting
the glasses. “An artery and a vein had been placed together so that the
endothelium, or inner lining of each, was in contact with the other,
giving a continuous serous surface. Which window did you say was
Borland’s? I wish you’d step to the other window and raise it, so that
I can be sure. I don’t want to go wandering all over the works looking
for him.”
“Yes,” the doctor said as he went, leaving him standing beside the
window from which he had been directing us, “yes, you surely should see
Mr. Borland. And don’t forget that young chemist of his, Lathrop,
either, If I can be of any more help to you, come back again.”
It was a long walk through the village and factory yards to the office
of Lewis Borland, but we were amply repaid by finding him in and ready
to see us. Borland was a typical Yankee, tall, thin, evidently
predisposed to indigestion, a man of tremendous mental and nervous
energy and with a hidden wiry strength.
“Mr. Borland,” introduced Kennedy, changing his tactics and adopting a
new role, “I’ve come down to you as an authority on rubber to ask you
what your opinion is regarding the invention of a townsman of yours
named Cushing.”
“Cushing?” repeated Borland in some surprise. “Why—”
“Yes,” interrupted Kennedy, “I understand all about it. I had heard of
his invention in New York and would have put some money into it if I
could have been convinced. I was to see him to-day, but of course, as
you were going to say, his death prevents it. Still, I should like to
know what you think about it.”
“Well,” Borland added, jerking out his words nervously, as seemed to be
his habit, “Cushing was a bright young fellow. He used to work for me
until he began to know too much about the rubber business.”
“Do you know anything about his scheme?” insinuated Kennedy.
“Very little, except that it was not patented yet, I believe, though he
told every one that the patent was applied for and he expected to get a
basic patent in some way without any interference.”
“Well,” drawled Kennedy, affecting as nearly as possible the air of a
promoter, “if I could get his assistant, or some one who had authority
to be present, would you, as a practical rubber man, go over to his
laboratory with me? I’d join you in making an offer to his estate for
the rights to the process, if it seemed any good.”
“You’re a cool one,” ejaculated Borland, with a peculiar avaricious
twinkle in the corners of his eyes. “His body is scarcely cold and yet
you come around proposing to buy out his invention and—and, of all
persons, you come to me.”
“To you?” inquired Kennedy blandly.
“Yes, to me. Don’t you know that synthetic rubber would ruin the
business system that I have built up here?”
Still Craig persisted and argued.
“Young man,” said Borland rising at length as if an idea had struck
him, “I like your nerve. Yes, I will go. I’ll show you that I don’t
fear any competition from rubber made out of fusel oil or any other old
kind of oil.” He rang a bell and a boy answered. “Call Lathrop,” he
ordered.
The young chemist, Lathrop, proved to be a bright and active man of the
new school, though a good deal of a rubber stamp. Whenever it was
compatible with science and art, he readily assented to every
proposition that his employer laid down.
Kennedy had already telephoned to the Winslows and Miss Winslow had
answered that Strong had returned from Boston. After a little
parleying, the second visit to the laboratory was arranged and Miss
Winslow was allowed to be present with her father, after Kennedy had
been assured by Strong that the gruesome relics of the tragedy would be
cleared away.
It was in the forenoon that we arrived with Borland and Lathrop. I
could not help noticing the cordial manner with which Borland greeted
Miss Winslow. There was something obtrusive even in his sympathy.
Strong, whom we met now for the first time, seemed rather suspicious of
the presence of Borland and his chemist, but made an effort to talk
freely without telling too much.
“Of course you know,” commenced Strong after proper urging, “that it
has long been the desire of chemists to synthesise rubber by a method
that will make possible its cheap production on a large scale. In a
general way I know what Mr. Cushing had done, but there are parts of
the process which are covered in the patents applied for, of which I am
not at liberty to speak yet.”
“Where are the papers in the case, the documents showing the
application for the patent, for instance?” asked Kennedy.
“In the safe, sir,” replied Strong.
Strong set to work on the combination which he had obtained from the
safe deposit vault. I could see that Borland and Miss Winslow were
talking in a low tone.
“Are you sure that it is a fact?” I overheard him ask, though I had no
idea what they were talking about.
“As sure as I am that the Borland Rubber Works are a fact,” she replied.
Craig also seemed to have overheard, for he turned quickly. Borland had
taken out his penknife and was moistening the blade carefully preparing
to cut into a piece of the synthetic rubber. In spite of his expressed
scepticism, I could see that he was eager to learn what the product was
really like.
Strong, meanwhile, had opened the safe and was going over the papers. A
low exclamation from him brought us around the little pile of
documents. He was holding a will in which nearly everything belonging
to Cushing was left to Miss Winslow.
Not a word was said, although I noticed that Kennedy moved quickly to
her side, fearing that the shock of the discovery might have a bad
effect on her, but she took it with remarkable calmness. It was
apparent that Cushing had taken the step of his own accord and had said
nothing to her about it.
“What does anything amount to?” she said tremulously at last. “The
dream is dead without him in it.”
“Come,” urged Kennedy gently. “This is enough for to-day.”
An hour later we were speeding back to New York. Kennedy had no
apparatus to work with out at Goodyear and could not improvise it.
Winslow agreed to keep us in touch with any new developments during the
few hours that Craig felt it was necessary to leave the scene of action.
Back again in New York, Craig took a cab directly for his laboratory,
leaving me marooned with instructions not to bother him for several
hours. I employed the time in a little sleuthing on my own account,
endeavouring to look up the records of those involved in the case. I
did not discover much, except an interview that had been given at the
time of the return of his expedition by Borland to the Star, in which
he gave a graphic description of the dangers from disease that they had
encountered.
I mention it because, though it did not impress me much when I read it,
it at once leaped into my mind when the interminable hours were over
and I rejoined Kennedy. He was bending over a new microscope.
“This is a rubber age, Walter,” he began, “and the stories of men who
have been interested in rubber often sound like fiction.”
He slipped a slide under the microscope, looked at it and then motioned
to me to do the same. “Here is a very peculiar culture which I have
found in some of that blood,” he commented. “The germs are much larger
than bacteria and they can be seen with a comparatively low power
microscope swiftly darting between the blood cells, brushing them
aside, but not penetrating them as some parasites, like that of
malaria, do. Besides, spectroscope tests show the presence of a rather
well-known chemical in that blood.”
“A poisoning, then?” I ventured. “Perhaps he suffered from the disease
that many rubber workers get from the bisulphide of carbon. He must
have done a good deal of vulcanising of his own rubber, you know.”
“No,” smiled Craig enigmatically, “it wasn’t that. It was an arsenic
derivative. Here’s another thing. You remember the field glass I used?”
He had picked it up from the table and was pointing at a little hole in
the side, that had escaped my notice before. “This is what you might
call a right-angled camera. I point the glass out of the window and
while you think I am looking through it I am really focusing it on you
and taking your picture standing there beside me and out of my apparent
line of vision. It would deceive the most wary.”
Just then a long-distance call from Winslow told us that Borland had
been to call on Miss Ruth and, in as kindly a way as could be, had
offered her half a million dollars for her rights in the new patent. At
once it flashed over me that he was trying to get control of and
suppress the invention in the interests of his own company, a thing
that has been done hundreds of times. Or could it all have been part of
a conspiracy? And if it was his conspiracy, would he succeed in
tempting his friend, Miss Winslow, to fall in with this glittering
offer?
Kennedy evidently thought, also, that the time for action had come, for
without a word he set to work packing his apparatus and we were again
headed for Goodyear.
XVI
THE BLOOD TEST
We arrived late at night, or rather in the morning, but in spite of the
late hour Kennedy was up early urging me to help him carry the stuff
over to Cushing’s laboratory. By the middle of the morning he was ready
and had me scouring about town collecting his audience, which consisted
of the Winslows, Borland and Lathrop, Dr. Howe, Dr. Harris, Strong and
myself. The laboratory was darkened and Kennedy took his place beside
an electric moving picture apparatus.
The first picture was different from anything any of us had ever seen
on a screen before. It seemed to be a mass of little dancing globules.
“This,” explained Kennedy, “is what you would call an educational
moving picture, I suppose. It shows normal blood corpuscles as they are
in motion in the blood of a healthy man. Those little round cells are
the red corpuscles and the larger irregular cells are the white
corpuscles.”
He stopped the film. The next picture was a sort of enlarged and
elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow
body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a
pair of shears. “This,” he went on, “is a picture of the now well known
tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something
like a horse-fly and is a perfect blood-sucker. Vast territories of
thickly populated, fertile country near the shores of lakes and rivers
are now depopulated as a result of the death-dealing bite of these
flies, more deadly than the blood-sucking, vampirish ghosts with which,
in the middle ages, people supposed night air to be inhabited. For this
fly carries with it germs which it leaves in the blood of its victims,
which I shall show next.”
A new film started.
“Here is a picture of some blood so infected. Notice that worm-like
sheath of undulating membrane terminating in a slender whip-like
process by which it moves about. That thing wriggling about like a
minute electric eel, always in motion, is known as the trypanosome.
“Isn’t this a marvellous picture? To see the micro-organism move,
evolve and revolve in the midst of normal cells, uncoil and undulate in
the fluids which they inhabit, to see them play hide and seek with the
blood corpuscles and clumps of fibrin, turn, twist, and rotate as if in
a cage, to see these deadly little trypanosomes moving back and forth
in every direction displaying their delicate undulating membranes and
shoving aside the blood cells that are in their way while by their side
the leucocytes, or white corpuscles, lazily extend or retract their
pseudopods of protoplasm. To see all this as it is shown before us here
is to realise that we are in the presence of an unknown world, a world
infinitesimally small, but as real and as complex as that about us.
With the cinematograph and the ultra-microscope we can see what no
other forms of photography can reproduce.
“I have secured these pictures so that I can better mass up the
evidence against a certain person in this room. For in the blood of one
of you is now going on the fight which you have here seen portrayed by
the picture machine. Notice how the blood corpuscles in this infected
blood have lost their smooth, glossy appearance, become granular and
incapable of nourishing the tissues. The trypanosomes are fighting with
the normal blood cells. Here we have the lowest group of animal life,
the protozoa, at work killing the highest, man.”
Kennedy needed nothing more than the breathless stillness to convince
him of the effectiveness of his method of presenting his case.
“Now,” he resumed, “let us leave this blood-sucking, vampirish tse-tse
fly for the moment. I have another revelation to make.”
He laid down on the table under the lights, which now flashed up again,
the little hollow silver cylinder.
“This little instrument,” Kennedy explained, “which I have here is
known as a canula, a little canal, for leading off blood from the veins
of one person to another—in other words, blood transfusion. Modern
doctors are proving themselves quite successful in its use.
“Of course, like everything, it has its own peculiar dangers. But the
one point I wish to make is this: In the selection of a donor for
transfusion, people fall into definite groups. Tests of blood must be
made first to see whether it ‘agglutinates,’ and in this respect there
are four classes of persons. In our case this matter had to be
neglected. For, gentlemen, there were two kinds of blood on that
laboratory floor, and they do not agglutinate. This, in short, was what
actually happened. An attempt was made to transfuse Cushing’s blood as
donor to another person as recipient. A man suffering from the disease
caught from the bite of the tse-tse fly—the deadly sleeping sickness
so well known in Africa—has deliberately tried a form of robbery which
I believe to be without parallel. He has stolen the blood of another!
“He stole it in a desperate attempt to stay an incurable disease. This
man had used an arsenic compound called atoxyl, till his blood was
filled with it and its effects on the trypanosomes nil. There was but
one wild experiment more to try—the stolen blood of another.”
Craig paused to let the horror of the crime sink into our minds.
“Some one in the party which went to look over the concession in the
Congo contracted the sleeping sickness from the bites of those
blood-sucking flies. That person has now reached the stage of insanity,
and his blood is full of the germs and overloaded with atoxyl.
“Everything had been tried and had failed. He was doomed. He saw his
fortune menaced by the discovery of the way to make synthetic rubber.
Life and money were at stake. One night, nerved up by a fit of insane
fury, with a power far beyond what one would expect in his ordinary
weakened condition, he saw a light in Cushing’s laboratory. He stole in
stealthily. He seized the inventor with his momentarily superhuman
strength and choked him. As they struggled he must have shoved a sponge
soaked with ether and orange essence under his nose. Cushing went under.