One could see that with all her canine instinct she wanted to “get”
that man. Her jaws were open, as, with longing eyes, she stood over the
prostrate form in the grass. The whistle was a signal, and she had been
taught to obey unquestioningly.
“Don’t move until we get to you, or you are a dead man,” shouted
Kennedy, pulling an automatic as he ran. “Are you hurt?”
There was no answer, but as we approached, the man moved, ever so
little, through curiosity to see his pursuers.
Schaef shot forward. Again the whistle sounded and she dropped back. We
bent over to seize him as Kennedy secured the dog.
“She’s a devil,” ground out the prone figure on the grass.
“Dana Phelps!” exclaimed Andrews, as the man turned his face toward us.
“What are you doing, mixed up in this?”
Suddenly there was a movement in the rear, toward the mausoleum itself.
We turned, but it was too late. Two dark figures slunk through the
gloom, bearing something between them. Kennedy slipped the leash off
Schaef and she shot out like a unchained bolt of lightning.
There was the whir of a high-powered machine which must have sneaked up
with the muffler on during the excitement. They had taken a desperate
chance and had succeeded. They were gone!
XXII
THE X-RAY “MOVIES”
Still holding Dana Phelps between us, we hurried toward the tomb and
entered. While our attention had been diverted in the direction of the
swamp, the body of Montague Phelps had been stolen.
Dana Phelps was still deliberately brushing off his clothes. Had he
been in league with them, executing a flank movement to divert our
attention? Or had it all been pure chance?
“Well?” demanded Andrews.
“Well?” replied Dana.
Kennedy said nothing, and I felt that, with our capture, the mystery
seemed to have deepened rather than cleared.
As Andrews and Phelps faced each other, I noticed that the latter was
now and then endeavouring to cover his wrist, where the dog had torn
his coat sleeve.
“Are you hurt badly?” inquired Kennedy.
Dana said nothing, but backed away. Kennedy advanced, insisting on
looking at the wounds. As he looked he disclosed a semicircle of marks.
“Not a dog bite,” he whispered, turning to me and fumbling in his
pocket. “Besides, those marks are a couple of days old. They have scabs
on them.”
He had pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper, and, unknown to
Phelps, was writing in the darkness. I leaned over. Near the point, in
the tube through which the point for writing was, protruded a small
accumulator and tiny electric lamp which threw a little disc of light,
so small that it could be hidden by the hand, yet quite sufficient to
guide Craig in moving the point of his pencil for the proper formation
of whatever he was recording on the surface of the paper.
“An electric-light pencil,” he remarked laconically, in an undertone.
“Who were the others?” demanded Andrews of Dana.
There was a pause as though he were debating whether or not to answer
at all. “I don’t know,” he said at length. “I wish I did.”
“You don’t know?” queried Andrews, with incredulity.
“No, I say I wish I did know. You and your dog interrupted me just as I
was about to find out, too.”
We looked at each other in amazement. Andrews was frankly skeptical of
the coolness of the young man. Kennedy said nothing for some moments.
“I see you don’t want to talk,” he put in shortly.
“Nothing to talk about,” grunted Dana, in disgust.
“Then why are you here?”
“Nothing but conjecture. No facts, only suspicions,” said Dana, half to
himself.
“You expect us to believe that?” insinuated Andrews.
“I can’t help what you believe. That is the fact.”
“And you were not with them?”
“No.”
“You’ll be within call, if we let you go now, any time that we want
you?” interrupted Kennedy, much to the surprise of Andrews.
“I shall stay in Woodbine as long as there is any hope of clearing up
this case. If you want me, I suppose I shall have to stay anyhow, even
if there is a clue somewhere else.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” offered Kennedy.
“I’ll give it.”
I must say that I rather liked the young chap, although I could make
nothing out of him.
As Dana Phelps disappeared down the road, Andrews turned to Kennedy.
“What did you do that for?” he asked, half critically.
“Because we can watch him, anyway,” answered Craig, with a significant
glance at the now empty casket. “Have him shadowed, Andrews. It may
lead to something and it may not. But in any case don’t let him get out
of reach.”
“Here we are in a worse mystery than ever,” grumbled Andrews. “We have
caught a prisoner, but the body is gone, and we can’t even show that he
was an accomplice.”
“What were you writing?” I asked Craig, endeavouring to change the
subject to one more promising.
“Just copying the peculiar shape of those marks on Phelps’ arm. Perhaps
we can improve on the finger-print method of identification. Those were
the marks of human teeth.”
He was glancing casually at his sketch as he displayed it to us. I
wondered whether he really expected to obtain proof of the identity of
at least one of the ghouls by the tooth-marks.
“It shows eight teeth, one of them decayed,” he remarked. “By the way,
there’s no use watching here any longer. I have some more work to do in
the laboratory which will keep me another day. To-morrow night I shall
be ready. Andrews, in the mean time I leave the shadowing of Dana to
you, and with the help of Jameson I want you to arrange to have all
those connected with the case at my laboratory to-morrow night without
fail.”
Andrews and I had to do some clever scheming to bring pressure to bear
on the various persons interested to insure their attendance, now that
Craig was ready to act. Of course there was no difficulty in getting
Dana Phelps. Andrews’s shadows reported nothing in his actions of the
following day that indicated anything. Mrs. Phelps came down to town by
train and Doctor Forden motored in. Andrews even took the precaution to
secure Shaughnessy and the trained nurse, Miss Tracy, who had been with
Montague Phelps during his illness but had not contributed anything
toward untangling the case. Andrews and myself completed the little
audience.
We found Kennedy heating a large mass of some composition such as
dentists use in taking impressions of the teeth.
“I shall be ready in a moment,” he excused himself, still bending over
his Bunsen flame. “By the way, Mr. Phelps, if you will permit me.”
He had detached a wad of the softened material. Phelps, taken by
surprise, allowed him to make an impression of his teeth, almost before
he realised what Kennedy was doing. The precedent set, so to speak,
Kennedy approached Doctor Forden. He demurred, but finally consented.
Mrs. Phelps followed, then the nurse, and even Shaughnessy.
With a quick glance at each impression, Kennedy laid them aside to
harden.
“I am ready to begin,” he remarked at length, turning to a peculiar
looking instrument, something like three telescopes pointing at a
centre in which was a series of glass prisms.
“These five senses of ours are pretty dull detectives sometimes,”
Kennedy began. “But I find that when we are able to call in outside aid
we usually find that there are no more mysteries.”
He placed something in a test-tube in line before one of the barrels of
the telescopes, near a brilliant electric light.
“What do you see, Walter?” he asked, indicating an eyepiece.
I looked. “A series of lines,” I replied. “What is it?”
“That,” he explained, “is a spectroscope, and those are the lines of
the absorption spectrum. Each of those lines, by its presence, denotes
a different substance. Now, on the pavement of the Phelps mausoleum I
found, you will recall, some roundish spots. I have made a very diluted
solution of them which is placed in this tube.
“The applicability of the spectroscope to the differentiation of
various substances is too well known to need explanation. Its value
lies in the exact nature of the evidence furnished. Even the very
dilute solution which I have been able to make of the material scraped
from these spots gives characteristic absorption bands between the D
and E lines, as they are called. Their wave-lengths are between 5774
and 5390. It is such a distinct absorption spectrum that it is possible
to determine with certainty that the fluid actually contains a certain
substance, even though the microscope might fail to give sure proof.
Blood—human blood—that was what those stains were.”
He paused. “The spectra of the blood pigments,” he added, “of the
extremely minute quantities of blood and the decomposition products of
hemoglobin in the blood are here infallibly shown, varying very
distinctly with the chemical changes which the pigments may undergo.”
Whose blood was it? I asked myself. Was it of some one who had visited
the tomb, who was surprised there or surprised some one else there? I
was hardly ready for Kennedy’s quick remark.
“There were two kinds of blood there. One was contained in the spots on
the floor all about the mausoleum. There are marks on the arm of Dana
Phelps which he probably might say were made by the teeth of my
police-dog, Schaef. They are human tooth-marks, however. He was bitten
by some one in a struggle. It was his blood on the floor of the
mausoleum. Whose were the teeth?”
Kennedy fingered the now set impressions, then resumed: “Before I
answer that question, what else does the spectroscope show? I found
some spots near the coffin, which has been broken open by a heavy
object. It had slipped and had injured the body of Montague Phelps.
From the injury some drops had oozed. My spectroscope tells me that
that, too, is blood. The blood and other muscular and nervous fluids of
the body had remained in an aqueous condition instead of becoming
pectous. That is a remarkable circumstance.”
It flashed over me what Kennedy had been driving at in his inquiry
regarding embalming. If the poisons of the embalming fluid had not been
injected, he had now clear proof regarding anything his spectroscope
discovered.
“I had expected to find a poison, perhaps an alkaloid,” he continued
slowly, as he outlined his discoveries by the use of one of the most
fascinating branches of modern science, spectroscopy. “In cases of
poisoning by these substances, the spectroscope often has obvious
advantages over chemical methods, for minute amounts will produce a
well-defined spectrum. The spectroscope ‘spots’ the substance, to use a
police idiom, the moment the case is turned over to it. There was no
poison there.” He had raised his voice to emphasise the startling
revelation. “Instead, I found an extraordinary amount of the substance
and products of glycogen. The liver, where this substance is stored, is
literally surcharged in the body of Phelps.”
He had started his moving-picture machine.
“Here I have one of the latest developments in the moving-picture art,”
he resumed, “an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently
visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable names
of biorontgenography, or kinematoradiography.”
Kennedy was holding his little audience breathless as he proceeded. I
fancied I could see Anginette Phelps give a little shudder at the
prospect of looking into the very interior of a human body. But she was
pale with the fascination of it. Neither Forden nor the nurse looked to
the right or to the left. Dana Phelps was open-eyed with wonder.
“In one X-ray photograph, or even in several,” continued Kennedy, “it
is difficult to discover slight motions. Not so in a moving picture.
For instance, here I have a picture which will show you a living body
in all its moving details.”
On the screen before us was projected a huge shadowgraph of a chest and
abdomen. We could see the vertebrae of the spinal column, the ribs, and
the various organs.
“It is difficult to get a series of photographs directly from a
fluorescent screen,” Kennedy went on. “I overcome the difficulty by
having lenses of sufficient rapidity to photograph even faint images on
that screen. It is better than the so-called serial method, by which a
number of separate X-ray pictures are taken and then pieced together
and rephotographed to make the film. I can focus the X-rays first on
the screen by means of a special quartz objective which I have devised.
Then I take the pictures.
“Here, you see, are the lungs in slow or rapid respiration. There is
the rhythmically beating heart, distinctly pulsating in perfect
outline. There is the liver, moving up and down with the diaphragm, the
intestines, and the stomach. You can see the bones moving with the
limbs, as well as the inner visceral life. All that is hidden to the
eye by the flesh is now made visible in striking manner.”
Never have I seen an audience at the “movies” so thrilled as we were
now, as Kennedy swayed our interest at his will. I had been dividing my
attention between Kennedy and the extraordinary beauty of the famous
Russian dancer. I forgot Anginette Phelps entirely.
Kennedy placed another film in the holder.
“You are now looking into the body of Montague Phelps,” he announced
suddenly.
We leaned forward eagerly. Mrs. Phelps gave a half-suppressed gasp.
What was the secret hidden in it?
There was the stomach, a curved sack something like a bagpipe or a
badly made boot, with a tiny canal at the toe connecting it with the
small intestine. There were the heart and lungs.
“I have rendered the stomach visible,” resumed Kennedy, “made it
‘metallic,’ so to speak, by injecting a solution of bismuth in
buttermilk, the usual method, by which it becomes more impervious to
the X-rays and hence darker in the skiagraph. I took these pictures not
at the rate of fourteen or so a second, like the others, but at
intervals of a few seconds. I did that so that, when I run them off, I
get a sort of compressed moving picture. What you see in a short space
of time actually took much longer to occur. I could have either kind of
picture, but I prefer the latter.
“For, you will take notice that there is movement here—of the heart,
of the lungs, of the stomach—faint, imperceptible under ordinary
circumstances, but nevertheless, movement.”
He was pointing at the lungs. “A single peristaltic contraction takes
place normally in a very few seconds. Here it takes minutes. And the
stomach. Notice what the bismuth mixture shows. There is a very slow
series of regular wave-contractions from the fundus to the pylorus.
Ordinarily one wave takes ten seconds to traverse it; here it is so
slow as almost to be unnoticed.”
What was the implication of his startling, almost gruesome, discovery?
I saw it clearly, yet hung on his words, afraid to admit even to myself
the logical interpretation of what I saw.
“Reconstruct the case,” continued Craig excitedly. “Mr. Phelps, always
a bon vivant and now so situated by marriage that he must be so, comes
back to America to find his personal fortune—gone.
“What was left? He did as many have done. He took out a new large
policy on his life. How was he to profit by it? Others have committed
suicide, have died to win. Cases are common now where men have ended
their lives under such circumstances by swallowing
bichloride-of-mercury tablets, a favourite method, it seems, lately.
“But Phelps did not want to die to win. Life was too sweet to him. He
had another scheme.” Kennedy dropped his voice.
“One of the most fascinating problems in speculation as to the future
of the race under the influence of science is that of suspended
animation. The usual attitude is one of reserve or scepticism. There is
no necessity for it. Records exist of cases where vital functions have
been practically suspended, with no food and little air. Every day
science is getting closer to the control of metabolism. In the trance
the body functions are so slowed as to simulate death. You have heard
of the Indian fakirs who bury themselves alive and are dug up days
later? You have doubted it. But there is nothing improbable in it.
“Experiments have been made with toads which have been imprisoned in
porous rock where they could get the necessary air. They have lived for
months in a stupor. In impervious rock they have died. Frozen fish can
revive; bears and other animals hibernate. There are all gradations
from ordinary sleep to the torpor of death. Science can slow down
almost to a standstill the vital processes so that excretions disappear
and respiration and heart-beat are almost nil.
“What the Indian fakir does in a cataleptic condition may be
duplicated. It is not incredible that they may possess some vegetable
extract by which they perform their as yet unexplained feats of
prolonged living burial. For, if an animal free from disease is
subjected to the action of some chemical and physical agencies which
have the property of reducing to the extreme limit the motor forces and
nervous stimulus, the body of even a warm-blooded animal may be brought
down to a condition so closely resembling death that the most careful
examination may fail to detect any signs of life. The heart will
continue working regularly at low tension, supplying muscles and other
parts with sufficient blood to sustain molecular life, and the stomach
would naturally react to artificial stimulus. At any time before
decomposition of tissue has set in, the heart might be made to resume
its work and life come back.
“Phelps had travelled extensively. In Siberia he must undoubtedly have
heard of the Buriats, a tribe of natives who hibernate, almost like the
animals, during the winters, succumbing to a long sleep known as the
‘leshka.’ He must have heard of the experiments of Professor
Bakhmetieff, who studied the Buriats and found that they subsisted on
foods rich in glycogen, a substance in the liver which science has
discovered makes possible life during suspended animation. He must have
heard of ‘anabiose,’ as the famous Russian calls it, by which
consciousness can be totally removed and respiration and digestion
cease almost completely.”
“But—the body—is gone!” some one interrupted. I turned. It was Dana
Phelps, now leaning forward in wide-eyed excitement.
“Yes,” exclaimed Craig. “Time was passing rapidly. The insurance had
not been paid. He had expected to be revived and to disappear with
Anginette Phelps long before this. Should the confederates of Phelps
wait? They did not dare. To wait longer might be to sacrifice him, if
indeed they had not taken a long chance already. Besides, you yourself
had your suspicions and had written the insurance company hinting at
murder.”
Dana nodded, involuntarily confessing.
“You were watching them, as well as the insurance investigator, Mr.
Andrews. It was an awful dilemma. What was to be done? He must be
resuscitated at any risk.
“Ah—an idea! Rifle the grave—that was the way to solve it. That would
still leave it possible to collect the insurance, too. The blackmail
letter about the five thousand dollars was only a blind, to lay on the
mythical Black Hand the blame for the desecration. Brought into light,
humidity, and warmth, the body would recover consciousness and the
life-functions resume their normal state after the anabiotic coma into
which Phelps had drugged himself.
“But the very first night the supposed ghouls were discovered. Dana
Phelps, already suspicious regarding the death of his brother,
wondering at the lack of sentiment which Mrs. Phelps showed, since she
felt that her husband was not really dead—Dana was there. His
suspicions were confirmed, he thought. Montague had been, in reality,
murdered, and his murderers were now making away with the evidence. He
fought with the ghouls, yet apparently, in the darkness, he did not
discover their identity. The struggle was bitter, but they were two to
one. Dana was bitten by one of them. Here are the marks of
teeth—teeth—of a woman.”
Anginette Phelps was sobbing convulsively. She had risen and was facing
Doctor Forden with outstretched hands.
“Tell them!” she cried wildly.
Forden seemed to have maintained his composure only by a superhuman
effort.
“The—body is—at my office,” he said, as we faced him with deathlike
stillness. “Phelps had told us to get him within ten days. We did get
him, finally. Gentlemen, you, who were seeking murderers, are, in
effect, murderers. You kept us away two days too long. It was too late.
We could not revive him. Phelps is really dead!”
“The deuce!” exclaimed Andrews, “the policy is incontestible!”
As he turned to us in disgust, his eyes fell on Anginette Phelps,
sobered down by the terrible tragedy and nearly a physical wreck from
real grief.
“Still,” he added hastily, “we’ll pay without a protest.”
She did not even hear him. It seemed that the butterfly in her was
crushed, as Dr. Forden and Miss Tracy gently led her away.
They had all left, and the laboratory was again in its normal state of
silence, except for the occasional step of Kennedy as he stowed away
the apparatus he had used.
“I must say that I was one of the most surprised in the room at the
outcome of that case,” I confessed at length. “I fully expected an
arrest.”
He said nothing, but went on methodically restoring his apparatus to
its proper place.
“What a peculiar life you lead, Craig,” I pursued reflectively. “One
day it is a case that ends with such a bright spot in our lives as the
recollection of the Shirleys; the next goes to the other extreme of
gruesomeness and one can hardly think about it without a shudder. And
then, through it all, you go with the high speed power of a racing
motor.”
“That last case appealed to me, like many others,” he ruminated, “just
because it was so unusual, so gruesome, as you call it.”
He reached into the pocket of his coat, hung over the back of a chair.
“Now, here’s another most unusual case, apparently. It begins, really,
at the other end, so to speak, with the conviction, begins at the very
place where we detectives send a man as the last act of our little
dramas.”
“What?” I gasped, “another case before even this one is fairly cleaned
up? Craig—you are impossible. You get worse instead of better.”
“Read it,” he said, simply. Kennedy handed me a letter in the angular
hand affected by many women. It was dated at Sing Sing, or rather
Ossining. Craig seemed to appreciate the surprise which my face must
have betrayed at the curious combination of circumstances.
“Nearly always there is the wife or mother of a condemned man who lives
in the shadow of the prison,” he remarked quietly, adding, “where she
can look down at the grim walls, hoping and fearing.”
I said nothing, for the letter spoke for itself.
I have read of your success as a scientific detective and hope that you
will pardon me for writing to you, but it is a matter of life or death
for one who is dearer to me than all the world.
Perhaps you recall reading of the trial and conviction of my husband,
Sanford Godwin, at East Point. The case did not attract much attention
in New York papers, although he was defended by an able lawyer from the
city.
Since the trial, I have taken up my residence here in Ossining in order
to be near him. As I write I can see the cold, grey walls of the state
prison that holds all that is dear to me. Day after day, I have watched
and waited, hoped against hope. The courts are so slow, and lawyers are
so technical. There have been executions since I came here, too—and I
shudder at them. Will this appeal be denied, also?
My husband was accused of murdering by poison—hemlock, they
alleged—his adoptive parent, the retired merchant, Parker Godwin,
whose family name he took when he was a boy. After the death of the old
man, a later will was discovered in which my husband’s inheritance was
reduced to a small annuity. The other heirs, the Elmores, asserted, and
the state made out its case on the assumption, that the new will
furnished a motive for killing old Mr. Godwin, and that only by
accident had it been discovered.
Sanford is innocent. He could not have done it. It is not in him to do
such a thing. I am only a woman, but about some things I know more than
all the lawyers and scientists, and I KNOW that he is innocent.