The Stolen War Secret

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ARTHUR B. REEVE

THE STOLEN WAR SECRET

First published in Adventure, December 1914

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2018
Version Date: 2022-09-16

Produced by Matthias Kaether and Roy Glashan
Proofread by Gordon Hobley

All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

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Chapter I. The Mystery Of The Spy
Chapter II. The Mexican Cabaret
Chapter III. The Secret Service
Chapter IV. The Gyroscope Aeroplane
Chapter V. The Archeologist
Chapter VI. The Mescal Party
Chapter VII. The Buried Treasure
Chapter VIII. The Curio-Shop
Chapter IX. The Gun-Runners
Chapter X. The Air Terror
Chapter XI. The Radio-Detective
Chapter XII. The Triple Mirror
Chapter XIII. The Wireless Wire-Tapper
Chapter XIV. The Artificial Kidney
Chapter XV. The Arrow Poison
Chapter XVI. The Stolen Secret

Adventure, December 1914, with "The Stolen War Secret"

I. — THE MYSTERY OF THE SPY

T was during the dark days at the beginning of our recent unpleasantness with Mexico that Craig Kennedy and I dropped in one evening at the new Vanderveer Hotel to glance at the ticker to see how affairs were going.

We were bending over the tape, oblivious to everything else about us, when we felt a hand on each of our shoulders.

"We've just had a most remarkable tragedy right here in the hotel," a voice whispered. "Are you busy tonight, Kennedy?"

Craig and I turned simultaneously and found Michael McBride, the house-detective of the hotel, an old friend of ours some years before in the city detective-bureau.

McBride was evidently making a great effort to appear calm, but it was very apparent that something had completely upset him.

McBride gave a hasty glance about and edged us over into a quiet corner away from the ticker.

"Why," he replied in an undertone, "we've just discovered one of our guests—a Madame Valcour—in her room—dead!"

"Yes—the most incomprehensible thing you can imagine. Come upstairs with me, before the coroner gets here," he urged. "I'd like you to see the case, Kennedy, before he musses things up."

We followed the house-detective to the tenth floor. As we left the elevator he nodded to the young woman floor-clerk who led the way down the thickly carpeted hall. She stopped at a door, and through the transom overhead we could see that the room was dimly lighted. She opened the door and we caught a glimpse of a sumptuously furnished suite.

On the snowy white bed, in all her cold, stony beauty, lay the beautiful Madame Valcour, fully dressed in the latest of Parisian creations, perfect from her hat which breathed of the Rue de la Paix to her dainty tango-slippers peeping from a loosely draped skirt which accentuated rather than concealed her exquisite form.

She was a striking woman, dark of hair and skin. In life she must have been sensuously attractive. But now her face was drawn and contorted with a ghastly look.

There she lay, alone, in an elegantly appointed room of an exclusive hotel. Only a few feet away were hundreds of gay guests chatting and laughing, with no idea of the terrible tragedy so near them.

"Oh—niña—niña," cried the maid, whose name I learned afterward was Juanita. "She was muy simpática—muy simpática."

"'Niña,'" remarked Kennedy to us in an undertone, "means 'little girl,' the familiar term for mistress. As for 'muy simpática,' it means, literally, 'very sympathetic,' but really can not be done justice to in English. It is that charming characteristic of personal attractiveness, the result of a sweet disposition."

"You haven't heard of her?" he repeated. "Well—I'm not surprised after all. Really I can't say I know much about her myself—except that she was a beauty and attracted everybody's attention here at the hotel. Among other things, she was a friend of Colonel Sinclair, I believe. You know him, don't you—the retired army-engineer— interested in Mexican mines and railroads, and a whole lot of things? Oh, you've seen his name in the newspapers often enough. Lately, you know, he has been experimenting with airships for the army—has a big estate out on Long Island." Kennedy nodded.

"I don't know whether you know it or not," continued McBride, "but we seem to have quite a colony of Mexican refugees here at the Vanderveer. She seemed to be one of them—at least she seemed to know them all. I think she was a Frenchwoman. At least, you know how all the Latin-Americans seem naturally to gravitate to Paris and how friendly the French are toward them."

"How did you come to discover her?" asked Kennedy, bending over her again. "She couldn't have been dead very long."

"Well—she came into the hotel during the dinner-hour. As nearly as I can find out, the elevator boy, who seems to have been the only person who observed her closely, says that she acted as if she were dazed.

"They tell me her maid was out at the time. But about half an hour after Madame came in, there was a call for her over the telephone. The operator got no answer from her room, although the boy had seen her go up and the young lady who is floor-clerk on the tenth floor said she had not gone out."

"Did the person on the telephone leave any message—give any name?" asked Craig.

"Yes. It was a man who seemed to be very much excited—said that it was Señor Morelos—just Señor Morelos—she would know."

"Why, when he found he couldn't get her, he rang off. A few minutes later her maid Juanita came in. The moment she opened the door with her key, she gave a scream and fainted."

Craig said nothing. He was making a careful examination of both the room and of the body on the bed.

Gently, as if he would not hurt such an exquisite creature even in death, he squeezed a tiny drop of blood from the little puncture and caught it on a sterilized glass slide of a microscope, which he carried in a small compact emergency-case in his pocket.

Thrown carelessly into a top drawer of the dressing-table was a chatelaine. He opened it. There seemed to be nothing there except several articles of feminine vanity. In the bottom, however, was a little silver box which he opened. There lay a number of queer little fuzzy buttons—at least they looked like buttons. He took one, examined it closely, found it rather soft, tasted it—made a wry face and dropped the whole thing into his pocket.

A HEAVY tap sounded on the door. McBride opened it. It was our old friend, Dr. Leslie, the coroner.

"Well," he exclaimed taking in the whole situation, hardly more surprised at seeing us than at the strangeness of the handsome figure on the bed. "Well—what is all this?"

McBride shook his head gravely and repeated substantially what he had already told us.

There is no need to go into the lengthy investigation that the coroner conducted. He questioned one servant and employee after another, without eliciting any more real information than we had already obtained.

The maid was quite evidently a Mexican and spoke very little and very poor English. She seemed to be in great distress, and as far as we could determine it was genuine. Through her broken English and our own fragmentary knowledge of Spanish, we managed to extract her story, about as McBride had told it.

Madame Valcour had engaged her in Paris, where she had been taken and later had been thrown on her own resources by a family which had been ruined in the revolution in Mexico. As for a Monsieur Valcour, she had never seen him. She thought that Madame was a widow.

As the questioning continued, I read between the lines, however, that Madame Valcour was in all probability an adventuress of a high order, one of those female soldiers of fortune who, in Paris, London, New York, and all large cities, seem to have a way of bobbing up at the most unexpected moments, in some way connected, through masculine frailty, with great national and international events.

The questioning over, the coroner ordered that the body be sent down to one of the city hospitals where an autopsy could be performed, and we rode down in the elevator together.

"Extraordinary—most extraordinary," repeated Dr. Leslie as we paused for a moment in an angle of the lobby to discuss the conclusion of his preliminary investigation. "There is just one big point, though, that we shall have to clear up before we can go ahead with anything else. What was the cause of death? There was no gas in the room. It couldn't have been illuminating gas, then. It must have been a poison of some kind."

"I assume nothing—yet," replied the coroner, quickly backing water, and affecting the air of one who could say much if he chose but was stopped by professional and official etiquette.

"You'll keep me informed as to what you do discover?" asked Kennedy with a deference that could not fail to be ingratiating.

"Indeed I will," answered the coroner, cordially taking the flattery. "Now I must be off—let me see—an accident case. Yes indeed, Kennedy, I shall be only too glad to keep you informed and to have your cooperation on the case."

"Poison of some kind," repeated Kennedy as Dr. Leslie disappeared. "Sounds very simple when you put it that way. I wish I could handle the whole thing for him. However, I suspect he'll come around in a day or two—begging me to help him save his precious reputation and find out what it really is."

"I know what he'll do," asserted McBride with a scowl. "He'll take this chance to rub it in on the Vanderveer. We've had a couple of suicides since we opened. It isn't our fault if such things happen. But somehow or other it seems to appeal to the city official to blame some private agency for anything like this. I tell you, Kennedy, we've got to protect the reputation of the hotel against such things. Now, if you'll take the case, I'll see that you don't lose anything by it."

"Gladly," replied Kennedy, to whom a mystery was as the breath of life. Then he added with a smile, "I had tacitly assumed as much after you spoke to me."

"I meant that you should," agreed McBride, "and I thank you. Only it is just as well that we understand each other clearly at the outset."

"Exactly. Has anything in Madame Valcour's actions about the hotel offered a clue—ever so slight?" asked Craig, plunging into the case eagerly.

"Perhaps," hesitated McBride as if trying to separate something that might be trivial from that which might be really important. "When she came here about a week ago, she left word at the telephone-desk that if a Señor Morelos should call, she was at home."

"Morelos?" repeated Kennedy. "That is the name of the man who called up tonight. Did he call?"

"But she must have had other callers," pursued Craig, evidently thinking of the attractiveness of the woman.

"Yes, indeed," answered McBride, "plenty of them. In fact, she seemed never to be able to stir about downstairs without having some one looking at her and ogling."

"No," agreed McBride, "and to be perfectly fair to her, she never gave any of them any encouragement, as far as I could see."

"Oh yes," recollected McBride. "He called on her—once, I think. Then for a couple of days she was away—out on Long Island, I believe she left word. It seems that there is a sort of Summer settlement of Mexicans and Latin-Americans generally out there, at a place called Seaville. It was only today that she returned from her visit."

"Seaville," repeated Kennedy. "That is out somewhere near Westport, the home of Sinclair, isn't it?"

He was chewing his unlighted cigar thoughtfully, as we tried to piece together the fragmentary bits of the story.

"I have been wondering," he said slowly, "just what she was here for anyway. I can't say that there is anything that throws much light on the subject. But she was so secretive, she threw such an air of mystery about herself, never told any one much about her goings-out or comings-in, and in fact seemed to be so careful —well, I've just been wondering whether she wasn't mixed up in some plot or other, wasn't playing a deeper game than we suspect with these precious friends of hers."

I looked at McBride attentively. Was he merely mystified by having had to deal with a foreigner who naturally was not as easy to understand as a native, or was the general impression he sought to convey really founded on that instinct which no true detective can afford to be without?

"In other words," McBride pursued, uninterrupted by Kennedy who was only too glad to glean any impression the house-man might have received, "I was never quite able to fathom her. You see, yourself, that she could not even have made much of a confidante of her maid. She was just the type I should pick out as—as the agent of somebody."

"Yes," he acquiesced. "You know as well as I do that if any one wants to accomplish anything, get information that it is hard to get, the first thing necessary is to employ a woman of the world. Why, men will tell their inmost secrets to a clever woman, if she knows how to play the game right! I can't persuade myself that—that it was all perfectly straight. She must have had a purpose in being here. I don't know what it could be. But—well—this tragedy shows that there must be something hidden under the surface. She—she might have been a spy."

He was evidently thinking of Colonel Sinclair. Sinclair, I knew, was a very wealthy mine-owner down in the southern state of Oaxaca in Mexico. I recalled having seen him once or twice—a tall, wiry, muscular man on whose face the deep tan showed that he had lived for years in the neighborhood of the tropical sun. Could Colonel Sinclair know anything of the mysterious death of Madame Valcour?

"A spy," pondered Kennedy at length. "What other people have you seen her with—or have reason to think she was with?"

"Why," replied McBride contemplatively, "I understand that she used to go around a good deal to a place which they call the Mexican-American Tea-Room— just around the corner from here."

"Not much—only that it seems to be frequented largely by people in the city who want to discuss affairs down in Mexico to the accompaniment of dishes that are hot with peppers and chilis. It's a peculiar place. They have a cabaret upstairs in the evening. I believe it is — well—pretty swift."

Kennedy seemed at last to have received some hint that indicated a possible line of action.

"I think I'll drop in there before Leslie gives this thing out to the papers," he decided. "Walter—come on—this is the life!"

II. — THE MEXICAN CABARET

WE easily found the Mexican-American cabaret and tea-room which McBride had mentioned. McBride himself refused to accompany us because it was likely that some of Valcour's visitors, if they happened to be there, might recognize him. Kennedy was better pleased to have it that way also, for McBride, whatever his other merits, had detective stamped over him from his hat on the back of his head down to his square-toed shoes.

The house was an old-fashioned, high-stooped structure, just around the corner from the Vanderveer, in the neighborhood where business was rapidly replacing residences.

Apparently the entrance was through what had once been a basement, but which had been remodeled.

We entered the low door. There did not seem to be anybody dining downstairs. But now and then sounds indicated that upstairs there were many people, and that they were thoroughly enjoying the entertainment the cabaret afforded.

Passing by a dark-skinned individual who seemed to serve as both waiter and look-out for the room downstairs, we mounted the steps, and on the parlor-floor found a full-fledged cabaret in operation.

With a hasty, all-inclusive glance about Craig selected a seat down near a little platform where there were several performers and a small dancing-floor fringed with little tables and chairs.

Fortunately, it was such a place as New Yorkers in search of the picturesque often drop in upon, especially with friends from out of town, and our entrance did not, therefore, excite any comment whatever.

A waiter promptly appeared beside us, and Kennedy leisurely scanned a bill of fare which enumerated all sorts of tortillas, chili con carne, tamales and frijoles. We ordered and began to look about us.

It was as strange and interesting a gathering as one could have found anywhere in the city. As nearly as I could make out there were refugees from Mexico, of every class and condition and nationality, who seemed to be in the habit of meeting there nightly. There were soldiers of fortune preparing to go down there if they got the chance. Here was a man who had fled from Vera Cruz on a transport, there was another aching to get away and break into the country as soon as there were any signs of the lifting of the embargo.

There were Mexicans, Americans, English, French, Germans—all who were interested in the unhappy republic south of us, all talking in animated tones, except now and then when a mutual confidence was exchanged between some of them, all seeming to know each other, if not to be on friendly terms with one another. What was seething under the surface an outsider could not judge. But of one thing I felt certain. If Valcour had been of this group, certainly none of them showed any knowledge of the tragedy, or if they did they were consummate actors and actresses.

THE music, furnished by a piano, mandolins and guitars on the platform, started up.

Across from us was a party of men and women talking to a woman, dark-eyed and olive-skinned, the type of Spanish dancing-girl. As the music started the girl rose.

We watched her intently. There was something fascinating about the woman. From the snap of her black eyes to the vibrating grace of her shapely ankle there was something that stamped her as unique. She seemed to realize the power nature had given her over the passions of men, to have the keen wit to play them off, and the joy of living to appreciate the dramas which were enacted.

She began with the danza de sombrero. A sombrero was placed on the floor and she danced about it, in and out, now drawing near and now gliding away without touching it. There was something fascinating, not so much about the dance as about the dancer, for the dance itself was interminable, monotonous.

Several times I saw that Kennedy had caught her eye, and when at last the dance ended she contrived to finish close to our table, so close that it was but a turn, an exchange of looks, a word or two, and, as cabaret dancers will, she was sitting at our table a moment later and Kennedy was ordering something.

The Señora spoke very good English and French, and the conversation glided along like a dance from one subject to another, for she had danced her way into almost every quarter of the gay world of America and Europe.

It was not long before Kennedy and she were discussing Mexican dances and somehow or other those of the south of Mexico were mentioned. The orchestra, meanwhile, had burst forth into a tango, followed by a maxixe, and many of the habitués of the cabaret were now themselves dancing.

"The Zapotecs," remarked Kennedy, "have a number of strange dances. There is one called the Devil Dance that I have often wished to see."

"The Devil Dance?" she repeated. "That usually takes place on feast-days of the saints. I have seen it often. On those occasions some of the dancers have their bodies painted to represent skeletons, and they also wear strange, feathered head-dresses."

"The Zapotec ballroom," she continued reminiscently, "is an open space near a village, and there the dance goes on by the light of a blazing fire. The dancers, men and women, are dressed in all kinds of fantastic costumes."

So from dancing the conversation drifted along to one topic after another, Kennedy showing a marvelous knowledge of things Mexican, mostly, I suspected, second-hand, for he had a sort of skill in such a situation of confining the subjects, if he chose, to those on which he was already somewhat acquainted.

She turned with a gay smile. Evidently the party of friends were eager to have her back.

Some words passed, and in a few moments we found ourselves at the other table with the rest of Señora Ruiz's friends. No one seemed to think it strange in this Bohemian atmosphere that two newcomers should be added to the party. In fact, I rather suspected that they welcomed us as possibly lightening the load of paying the checks which the waiters brought for various things ordered, none of which were exactly reasonable in price.

AMONG others whom we met was an American, a Western mining-woman whom all seemed to know as Hattie Hawley. She was of the breezy type that the West has produced, interested in Mexican affairs through having purchased an interest in some mines in the southern part of the country, and seemed to be thoroughly acquainted with the methods of Wall Street in exploiting mines.

It was a rapid-fire conversation that they carried on, and I kept silent for the most part, fearing that I might say the wrong thing, and following Kennedy's lead as much as possible.

Mrs. Hawley happened to be sitting next to Kennedy, and as the talk turned on the situation in the country in which all seemed to be interested in some way, Kennedy ventured to her—

"I should say I do," she replied frankly. "Why, it was only a few days ago that he came in here and we were all sitting at this very table discussing the situation down in Oaxaca. You know, I'm interested in some mines near Colonel Sinclair's, and in the same railroad through the region which he controls."

"No," she answered. "I suppose he is out on Long Island at his place at Westport. A fine boy, the Colonel. We all like him."

There was no mistaking the tone in which she made the remark. Even if it sounded a little unconventional, it was merely her way of testifying that she had a high regard for the gentleman.

"I have known the Colonel fairly well for a number of years," prevaricated Kennedy, and the conversation drifted on to other topics.

Kennedy managed to lead it about again so that in a perfectly inconsequential way, after the mention of Sinclair's name, he could say—

"I have heard him mention the name of a Madame Val—" he hesitated, as if the name were not familiar, "a Madame Valcour, I think it is. Is she here? Does she come around to the cabaret?"

"Oh yes," replied Hattie Hawley. "She comes around here quite often. I haven't seen her tonight though. She has been away for a few days—down on Long Island, I believe. Perhaps she is there yet."

I caught her looking significantly at Kennedy, and wondered what was coming next.

"Between you and me, I think the Colonel is stuck on her, only I wouldn't say that aloud here."

She flashed a glance at one of the men who had been sitting in the shadow, talking with Señora Ruiz.

"He could tell you more about her than I could," she remarked under her breath. "I never saw any one so crazy over a woman as he is over Valcour."

I glanced more closely at the man who was talking to Ruiz. He was dark-faced, tall, military in bearing, straight as an arrow, with a little black imperial and a distinguished shock of bushy dark hair.

"It's evident that she is an ardent admirer of him," remarked Kennedy following my eye, "whatever he may think of her." Then, louder, he asked of Mrs. Hawley, "What is his name? I don't believe I caught it when we were introduced—that is, if we were, in this very informal meeting."

"Whoever can learn how to get at the key and decipher those hieroglyphics will not only add a chapter to archeology, but he'll be rich—in my opinion—enormously rich. Why, my dear sir, there is more treasure in Mexico today that has ever..."

Kennedy turned. At another table were two men talking earnestly. One was the very type of the German savant, including the whiskers and the near-sighted glasses. The other looked very much as if he were an American college professor.

The savant, at least, seemed to be at home in the Bohemian atmosphere, but the other man looked for all the world as if he momentarily expected to be discovered by some of his students and have his reputation ruined forever.

"At the next table?" she answered looking around. "Why, that is Professor Neumeyer, Friedrich Neumeyer, the German archeologist. He has been all over Mexico—Yucatan, Mitla, the pyramids, wherever there are ruins. I never cared much about ruins—guess I'm too modern. But Colonel Sinclair does. He goes in for all that sort of thing—has collections of his own, and all that.

"I believe he and Neumeyer are great friends. I don't know the other man, but he looks like one of the professors from the University."

Kennedy continued to divide his attention between the party at our table and the archeologist. His companion, as I myself had observed, seemed entirely out of place outside a classroom or archeological museum, and I soon dismissed him from my thoughts.

But Neumeyer was different. There was a fascination about him, and in fact I felt that I would really like to know the old fellow well enough to have him tell me the tales of adventure combined with scholarship, with which I felt intuitively he must be bursting.

AS the hour grew later more people arrived, and the groups were continually splitting up and new ones being formed. Thus it came about that Kennedy and myself, having been set down I suppose as mere sightseers, found ourselves at last alone at the table, while Señora Ruiz and another gay party were chatting in animated tones farther down the room.

"I hardly think we are well acquainted enough yet to do much circulating about the room. It would look too much like 'butting in.' If any one speaks to us we can play them along, but we had better not do much speaking ourselves—yet."

It was a novel experience and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as I did every new phase of life in cosmopolitan New York.

The hour was growing late, however, and I began to wonder whether anything else was going to happen, when I saw a waiter go down quietly and speak to Señora Ruiz. A moment later the party of which she was a member rose and one by one disappeared up what had been the stairs of the house when it was formerly a residence. Others rose and followed, perhaps ten or a dozen, all of whom I recognized as intimate friends.

It had no effect on the crowd below, further than to reduce it slightly and put an end to the dancing of Ruiz.

"Private dining-rooms upstairs?" inquired Kennedy nonchalantly of the waiter as he came around again for orders.

Our friend Neumeyer and his guest had left some time before, and now there seemed to be little reason why we should stay.

"We have gained an entrée, anyhow," observed Kennedy, moving as if he were going.

He rose, walked over to the door and out into the hall. Down the staircase we could hear floating snatches of conversation from above. In fact it seemed as if in several of the dining-rooms there were parties of friends. One was particularly gay, and it was easy to conjecture that that was the party of which Señora Ruiz was the life.

Craig rejoined me at the table quickly, having looked about at practically all the private dining-rooms without exciting suspicion.

"It's all very interesting," he observed to me. "But although it has added to our list of acquaintances considerably, I can't say this visit has given us much real information. Still you never can tell, and until I am ready to come out in what I call my 'open investigation,' these are acquaintances worth cultivating. I have no doubt that Valcour and Sinclair would have been welcomed by that Ruiz party, and certainly from their actions it can not be that it is generally known yet that Valcour is dead."

I had been going over in my mind the names of those we had met and the names I had heard mentioned. Not once had any one said the name of Morelos.

"No," he answered with a covert glance around. "And I did not make any inquiries. You may have noticed that all these people here seem to be supporters of the Government. I was about to inquire about him once when it suddenly occurred to me that he might be connected with the rebels, the Constitutionalists. I thought it would be discretion to refrain from even mentioning his name before these Federals."

"Then perhaps Sinclair is playing the game with both factions," I conjectured hastily, adding, "and Valcour was doing the same—is that what you mean?"

"The dancing has begun again," he hinted to me, changing the subject to one less dangerous.

I took the hint and for a few moments we watched the people in the sensuous mazes of some of the new steps. Intently as I looked, I could see not the slightest evidence that any one in the cabaret knew of the terrible tragedy that had overtaken one of the habitues.

As I watched I wondered whether there might have been a love triangle of some kind. It had all been very unconventional. Had the Bohemian Valcour come between some of these fiery lovers? I could not help thinking of the modern dances, especially as Valcour must have danced them. I could almost imagine the flash of those tango-slippers and her beautiful ankle, the swaying of her lithe body. What might she not do in arousing passions?

Speculate as I might, however, I always came back to the one question, "Who was the mysterious Señor Morelos?"

I could think of no answer and was glad when Kennedy suggested that perhaps we had seen enough for one night.

III. — THE SECRET SERVICE

WE had scarcely turned down the street when I noticed that a man in a slouch-hat, pulled down over his eyes, was walking toward us.

As he passed I thought he peered out at us suspiciously from under the shelter of the hat.

If a fourteen-inch gun had been fired off directly behind us, I could not have been more startled. Here, in spite of all our haste and secrecy, we were followed, watched—even known.

"By Jove! Walter!" exclaimed Kennedy, almost before I had time to take in the situation. "It's Burke of the Secret Service!"

"The same," greeted a now familiar voice. "How are you?" he asked joining us and walking slowly down the street.

"Working on a case," replied Kennedy colorlessly, meantime searching Burke's face to discover whether it might be to our advantage to take him in on the secret.

We had turned the corner and were standing in the deserted street near an electric light. Burke unfolded a newspaper which he had rolled up and was carrying in his hand.

"These newspaper fellows don't let much get past them," he said with a nod and a twinkle of his eye toward me. "I suppose you have seen this?"

We had not seen it, for our prolonged stay in the Mexican cabaret had, for the time being at least, superseded the interest which had taken us into the Vanderveer in the first place to look at the ticker. In the meantime an enterprising newspaper had rushed out its late edition with an extra.

The news account, in a little box at the bottom of the page where it had evidently been dropped in at the last moment, was also in red. It was meager, but exciting:

Plans which represent the greatest war secret of the Government have been stolen, it was learned today semi-officially in Washington.

The entire machinery of the Secret Service has been put into operation to recover the stolen documents.

Just what the loss is could not be learned by our correspondent from any one in authority, but the general activity of both the Secret Service and the War College seems to confirm the rumors current in the capital tonight.

As nearly as can be ascertained, it is believed that the information, if it has fallen into the hands of the Mexican Government, may prove particularly dangerous, and, while official Washington is either denying or minimizing the loss, it is reported indirectly that if the truth were known it would arouse great public concern.

That was all. Only pressure of time and the limited space of the box in which the news appeared had prevented its elaboration into a column or two of conjecture.

"What were the plans?" both Craig and I asked almost together as we read the extra. "Is that what brings you to New York?"

Burke leaned over to us excitedly and though there was no possibility of being overheard whispered hoarsely—

"Yes," replied Kennedy, "telautomatics—exploding bombs at long range by Hertzian wave impulses."

"Exactly. Well—this case goes far beyond even that," pursued Burke with another glance around. "I need not ask you fellows if I can trust you. We understand each other." He lowered his voice even more. "The secret that has been stolen is the wireless control of aeroplanes and aerial torpedoes. They use a gyroscope in it— and—oh—I don't know anything much about mechanics," he added floundering hopelessly, "but I do know about crime and criminals, and there is some big criminal at work here. That's in my line, even if I don't know much about science."

"Where were the plans stolen?" asked Kennedy. "Surely not from the Government itself in Washington?"

"No," answered Burke. "They were stolen out on Long Island, at Westport. Colonel Sinclair, the retired army engineer, had a model."

Burke looked at Craig for a moment as if he were positively uncanny, and perhaps knew all about what the Secret Service man was about to say, even before he had said it.

"Not personally," he replied. "But I have run across him in connection with a case which I am interested in. I understood that he was a friend of a Madame Valcour who has just been discovered dead up at the Vanderveer. It is a most mysterious case. She—"

"Madame Valcour?" interrupted Burke, now in turn himself surprised. "What sort of looking woman was she?"

Kennedy described her briefly, and ran over as much of the case as he felt it prudent to talk about at present.

"She's one of the very persons I'm trying to get a line on!" ejaculated Burke. "There's a sort of colony of Latin-Americans out there, across the bay from Sinclair's. Sinclair knew her—had been automobiling and motor-boating with her. And she's dead, you say?"

"Only my old friend the coroner, Dr. Leslie, stands in the way of saying how and by what," he confirmed impatiently. "What do you know about her?"

"I suspected some of those people out there at Seaville," he resumed slowly. "I found out that when they are in the city they usually drop in at that Mexican cabaret down the street."

"There seemed to be hardly any of them left out at Seaville," went on Burke. "If any of them has pulled off anything, they have all come to New York for cover. My people at Washington hurried me up to Westport first, and after I looked over the ground I saw nothing to do but come back to New York to watch these Mexicans. I am told they make a sort of rendezvous out of this cabaret."

"We just went in, like any other sight-seers," replied Craig. "There was a Señora Ruiz, dancing there—"

"Yes," put in Burke. "She lives out there at Seaville. Has a cottage on the hill back of the hotel which she had leased for the season. Any one else?"

"Another one," added Burke excitedly. "He stayed at the hotel—jealous as the deuce of Valcour, too, they say. She was stopping at the hotel. You can imagine that Sanchez and Sinclair are not—well —just exactly pals," finished Burke. "Any one else?"

"Oh, several others," said Kennedy. "We were introduced and sat next to a Mrs. Hawley."

"She's a peculiar woman, as nearly as I can learn," remarked Burke. "I don't think she liked Valcour much. I haven't been able to make out yet whether it was just because her interests were similar to those of Sinclair or whether there was something more to it, but if the Colonel would only say the word, I guess she wouldn't stop long in saying 'Yes.' You see, I've only started on the case—just got into New York and haven't had a chance to see any of these people yet. I'm giving you only the impressions I got out there from the people I talked to. Sinclair, as nearly as I can make out, 'loves the ladies,' to quote the cabaret song to that effect, but I don't think there is any particular lady."

"It's a peculiar situation," chimed in Craig. "Señora Ruiz, it seemed to me, thinks that Sanchez is just about right. And he is a rather striking-looking fellow, too. There's one person, though, Burke, that I didn't see or hear about, who interests me. Did you hear anything about a chap named Morelos?"

"Morelos—Morelos," repeated Burke. "The name is familiar. No—I didn't hear anything about him, in this case. But— why, yes. He wouldn't be with these people. He's one of the Revolutionist junta, here in the city. These people are all Government supporters."

"I never had anything to do with him," replied Burke. "But I believe the Government—our Government—has had a good deal of trouble with him about the embargo on arms, since it was reestablished. He has been shipping them down there when he gets a chance. I can find out all about him for you, though."

"I wish you would," said Craig, "but the plans—how did they happen to be in Westport? What connection did Sinclair have with them?"

"Well, you see, the thing was the invention of Colonel Sinclair," explained Burke. "I saw him, and although I couldn't get him to talk much about these people—I suppose he was afraid to, for fear of his interests in Mexico—he was ready enough to talk about his invention. He told me he had never patented it, that it was too valuable to patent. He has been working on it for years, and only recently perfected it. As soon as it seemed likely that there might eventually be hostilities, he took a trip to Washington and gave it outright to the Government."

"Yes," agreed Burke. "The Colonel is a big man all right. You see this was one of his hobbies. He has spent thousands of dollars of his own money on it. There were two sets of plans made—one which he took to Washington and one which he kept himself out on his estate on Long Island. His own plans out there are those that have been stolen, not the plans that he gave to the Government."

"Yes, indeed. They sent experts up to look at his machine, went over the thing thoroughly. Oh, there is no doubt about it."

"I haven't had much time, it's true," said Burke modestly. "Sinclair had Washington on long-distance as soon as he discovered the theft, and I was taken off a case and hustled up to Westport immediately, without much chance to find out what it was all about."

"As far as I can make out," he answered, "it must have been a most remarkable theft. The plans were stolen from Sinclair's safe, in his own library. And you can imagine that Sinclair is not the sort who would have an old-fashioned, antiquated safe, either. It was small, but one of the latest type."

"Neither, as far as I could see," replied Burke. "That's perhaps the most remarkable feature of the whole thing. How the fellow got into the safe is more than I can figure out. There wasn't a mark of violence on it. Yet it had been opened. Not a soul in the world knew the combination except Sinclair, and he says that if he should happen to forget it or to die the safe would have to be drilled open. But they got in, nevertheless, and they seemed to know just what to take and the value that might be attached to it."

As Burke proceeded with the details of the amazing case, Kennedy became more and more interested. For the moment, he forgot all about Valcour, or at least concluded that we had unexpectedly crossed a trail that would aid in the solution of that case.

BURKE had drawn from his capacious pocket a small but rather heavy apparatus, and, as we gathered about, displayed it under the light of the electric lamp overhead.

"Sinclair found this thing in his study the next morning," he explained. "The thieves, whoever they were, must have left it in their hurry to get away after they found the plans."

I looked at it uncomprehendingly. It was a small box, flattened so that it could be easily carried in a coat-pocket.

Craig opened it. Inside was what seemed to be a little specially constructed dry battery, and in another compartment a most peculiar instrument, something like a diminutive flat telephone transmitter. It was connected by flexible silk-covered wires to ear-pieces that fitted over the head, after the manner of the headgear used by telephone operators or operators in wireless.

"I can make nothing out of it," confessed Burke, as Kennedy turned the thing over and over, shook it, fitted it on his head, examined it again, and then replaced the whole thing in its neat, compact box.

"We have Sinclair's word," asserted Burke. "That is all I know, and I assume that he is telling the truth. There couldn't be any object in giving the invention to the Government and then robbing himself. No, if you knew Sinclair you'd know that about a thing like this he is as straight as a string. I feel that I can say positively that the papers were in the safe when it was locked by him for the night. He told me he put them there himself. And when he opened the safe in the morning they were gone.

"And, mind you, Kennedy, there wasn't a mark of any kind on the safe—not a mark. I went over it with a glass and couldn't find a thing, not a scratch—not even a finger-print—nothing except this queer arrangement which Sinclair himself found."

Kennedy closed the cover of the little case and slipped the thing into his pocket, still pondering.

"It grows more incredible, too," pursued Burke, looking at us frankly. "And then, to top it all off, when I do get back to the city I happen to run across you fellows hot on the trail of the death of Valcour herself —whatever she may be or have to do with the case. There's only one thing Sinclair will not talk about freely and that is women —and this precious crew of Mexican friends of his. I'm afraid we shall have to go it alone on that end of it, without any assistance from him. All I was able to get, besides a word or two from him, was the gossip out there." He paused, then went on, "I wonder if we can't pool our interests, Kennedy, and work together on these cases?"

"Burke," exclaimed Craig, for the moment showing a glimpse of the excitement that was surging through his mind, "I had no idea when I took up this case of Valcour for McBride of the Vanderveer that I should be doing my country a service also. When are you going up to Westport again?"

Burke looked at his watch. He was evidently considering what Kennedy had told him about the Mexican cabaret. It was growing late and there was little chance of his getting anything there now, or in fact tomorrow, until night-time came again.

"I can go tomorrow," he answered, evidently only too glad to have Kennedy's cooperation. "I'll go up there with you myself at any time you say."

IV. — THE GYROSCOPE AEROPLANE

EARLY the following morning we met Burke in the Long Island corner of the Pennsylvania Station. It had been late enough when we parted the night before, and as far as we knew nothing further had occurred in either the Sinclair robbery or the Valcour murder cases.

It was an early train and we had it mostly to ourselves, for we were starting even before the flood of the stream of commuters began, going the other way, toward the city.

As our train whisked us along Craig leaned back in his chair and surveyed the glimpses of water and countryside through the window. Now and then, as we got farther out from the city, through a break in the trees one could catch glimpses of the deep blue salt water of bay and sound and the dazzling whiteness of the sand in the clear morning air.

It was a pleasant ride, but we made it in silence and, without wasting any time, at a livery stable across from the quaint little Westport station we secured a rig and hastened out to Colonel Sinclair's.

The house was situated on a neck of land, with the restless waters of the Sound on one side and the calmer waters of the bay on the other.

Westport Bay itself lay in a beautifully wooded, hilly country, and Sinclair's house stood on an elevation, with a huge sweep of terraced lawn before it, running down to the water's edge.

As we pulled up under the wide stone ivy-covered porte-cochère, Sinclair, who had been awaiting us anxiously after the receipt of a telegram from Burke, greeted us and led the way into his library, a large room crowded with curios and objects of art which he had collected on his travels in Latin-America.

Sinclair was a tall, lithe, wiry man with a seamed and furrowed face. I noticed particularly his loose-jointed but very deft manner of handling himself and could not help thinking that it marked him as a born bird-man.

It was a superb literary and scientific workshop overlooking the bay, with a stretch of several miles of sheltered water.

"Tell me," he asked anxiously before we were fairly in the library, "is—is it true— that story in the newspapers about Madame Valcour?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is," replied Burke, hastening to introduce us and at the same time watching Sinclair's face narrowly.

"Yes," he replied guardedly. "In fact, only the day before, I was out with her in my new boat, the Streamline, which you can see down there anchored just off the dock."

He looked away and pointed down and across the bay. "She was staying at that hotel—the Seaville House."

A quick look from Burke told us that that was where the colony of Mexicans had established themselves, spending the Summer, and I recalled that he had said that Senora Ruiz had hired a cottage back of the hotel and up the hill.

Sinclair had evidently said about all he was disposed to say on the subject, and Kennedy led the conversation around to the robbery.

The Colonel repeated substantially the same story we had already heard from Burke.

"And you found nothing—no marks— have no clue?" asked Craig who had been following attentively.

"Nothing except that peculiar instrument I gave Burke," replied Sinclair. "You have seen it? What do you suppose it is, Burke?"

He dropped down on his knees before the now-closed safe and opened the strange contrivance which Sinclair had found.

We watched in silence as Kennedy placed the peculiar telephone-like transmitter close to the combination lock and turned the combination slowly.

"With the burglar's microphone," he answered. "The microphone is now used by cracksman for picking combination-locks. When you turn the lock a slight sound is made when the proper number comes opposite the working-point. It can be heard sometimes by a sensitive ear, although it is imperceptible to most persons. But by using a microphone it is easy to hear the sounds which allow of opening the lock."

IT was difficult to determine whether Burke or Sinclair had been the more impressed by the seeming wizardry of Kennedy in discovering how the safe had been opened. That point, however, was at present at least of minor importance to Kennedy. Not only was it necessary but he was most interested in knowing about the wonderful contrivance of Sinclair's which had called forth such ingenuity in order to get possession of it.

With the true spirit of the inventor, Sinclair was now all enthusiasm, and was prepared to talk of nothing else except this child of his brain.

"It is a crewless aeroplane," he explained eagerly. "It is exactly as if you sat here in this room and merely by manipulating a series of keys could control the action of either an aeroplane or a submarine—anything that moves by power—miles away.

"You catch what it means," he went on. "That thing might carry enough of the most powerful explosive to blow up the locks of the Panama Canal, to send any of our super-dreadnoughts to the bottom, if it were directed against us.

"In the hands of an enemy there is no telling what might not happen. He could send one of these infernal, self-propelled, safely directed machines where and when he wanted it and could explode it at exactly the moment, when it would do the most damage."

Sinclair led the way to a concrete and sheet-iron hangar down the terrace toward the water's edge.

As he directed, a mechanician wheeled the aeroplane out on the runway in front of the hangar.

"This is the gyroscope," began Sinclair, pointing out a thing encased in an aluminum sheath which weighed, all told, perhaps fourteen or fifteen pounds.

"You understand," he continued, "the gyroscope is really a flywheel mounted on gimbals and can turn on any of its axes so that it can assume any angle in space. When it's at rest, like this, you can turn it easily. But when it is set revolving, it tends to persist always in the plane in which it was started rotating."

I took hold of it and it did turn readily in any direction that I desired. I could feel, as I turned it, the heavy little flywheel inside.

"There is a pretty high vacuum in that aluminum case," went on Sinclair. "There's very little friction on that account. The power to rotate the flywheel is obtained from this little dynamo here, run by the gas-engine which also turns the propellers of the aeroplane."

"But, suppose the engine should stop?" I asked sceptically. "How about the gyroscope?"

"It will go right on for several minutes. You know the Brennan monorail-car will stand up some time after the power is shut off. And I carry a small storage-battery that will run the gyroscope for some time too. That's all been guarded against."

He was the typical inventor, optimistic. Sinclair cranked the engine, a seven-cylindered affair, with the cylinders sticking out like the spokes of a wheel without a rim. The propellers turned so fast that I could not see the blades—turned with that strong, steady, fierce, droning buzz that can be heard a long distance and which is a thrilling sound to hear, wafted on the Summer breeze as if a hundred giant cicadas had broken loose to predict warm weather.

The inventor reached over and attached the little dynamo, at the same time setting the gyroscope at its proper angle and starting it.

"This is the mechanical brain of my new flyer," he remarked, patting the round aluminum case almost lovingly. "You can look in through this little window of glass which I have let into the case, and you can see the flywheel inside revolving—ten thousand revolutions a minute. Press down on it," he shouted to me.

As I placed both hands on the case of the apparently frail instrument, he added— "You remember how easily you moved it just a moment ago."

I pressed down with all my strength. Then I literally raised myself off my feet, resting my two hands on the case about the gyroscope. That uncanny little instrument seemed to resent—there is no other word that expresses it quite so well—resent my very touch. It was almost human, petulant with interference. Instead of yielding, it actually rose on the side I was pressing down!

Colonel Sinclair laughed at the puzzled look on my face. I took my hands off and the gyroscope leisurely and nonchalantly resumed its original position.

"Without going into the theory of the thing," explained Sinclair, "those are the properties I use—applied to the rudder and the ailerons-—those little flat planes at the ends, between the two large main planes. That gives me automatic stability for the machine. I'm not going to take time to explain how it is done. But it is in the combination of the various parts that I have discovered the basic principle."

"How about the wireless control?" asked Kennedy, to whom the gyroscope was interesting but not new.

"I don't know whether you are familiar with the theory of wireless telegraphy or not," began Sinclair, to which Kennedy nodded an affirmative, forgetful of the rest of us. "But it has gone ahead fast during the past few years. The reason? Simple— very simple! In wireless telegraphy they have been able to discard coherers and relays and to use detectors of various kinds and microphones in their places.

"But in wireless telautomatics it is different. There we have been compelled to keep the coherer. That has been the trouble, that has been the thing that has held us back. The coherer is often spasmodic. We can't always depend on it.

"Well, I suppose you are acquainted with Hammond's mercury-steel disk coherer? I have improved on even that. So, I may say, we come finally to this coherer which I myself have invented for the special purpose of wireless-controlled vehicles of all kinds."

"This," he explained with pardonable pride, "is my radio-combinator. You see I have twelve numbers here on the keys— forward, back, start, stop propeller-motor, rudder right, rudder left, stop steering-motor, light signals front, light signals rear, launch air-torpedoes—there is one of them over in the corner—and so on.

"That instrument I call a telecommutator. Then, too, I use what is called an aerial coherer relay."

He paused a moment to let the thing sink into our minds. I had long since given up and had joined Burke in silent wonder. Not so with Kennedy. His mind ran along, if anything, ahead of Sinclair; and now and then he asked a question which elicited an answer that showed that Sinclair appreciated talking to him about his hobby.

"The idea," went on Sinclair again, "is that of delayed contact. You understand, the machinery to propel and steer the aeroplane is always ready. But when the right impulse is given to it, it actually delays a few seconds. That is so that the direction given can be automatically repeated back to me. Then if it should prove to be wrong or undesirable I can change it—instantly— before it is too late."

"Oh, there are many technicalities," he went on. "But you can see for yourself that it really takes no great experience to run the airship. You could do it—any one with common sense could do it after I had showed him once what to do. It is all done by merely paying attention to the signals and depressing the right key here, of a limited number.

"You see I have improved on all my predecessors—on Wilson and Gardner in England, Roberts in Australia, Wirth and Lirpa in Germany, Gabet in France, and Tesla, Edison, Sims, and the younger Hammond in our own country."

"Of course," he observed, "you know that wireless power doesn't operate the aeroplane. The wireless waves merely operate a system of relays. The airship carries its own power, just like any other—with the exception of the gyroscope, of course. I control that power, sitting here, just as if I were aboard the aeroplane."

As I went over quickly in my mind the points he had touched on in our talk, I felt that everything had been thought out most carefully. And when I reflected that it all could be controlled automatically, or, perhaps better, telautomatically, I felt simply astounded.

"You see," he went on, "when she is working automatically, the wireless impulses are carried to a short aerial, like a mast, sticking up there just a little above the planes."

The mechanician threw in a switch. The motor caught on. The air-ship hummed and trembled. The fumes of gasoline spread out through the air, stifling.

The mechanician retired and there was the airship, throbbing away, an inanimate thing, yet somehow now in my eyes endowed with life, with something akin to intelligence.

THE aeroplane rose under the unseen guidance of the wireless. Out she streaked from the run-way and shot up, up, up, with the flag flapping proudly from the upper plane. She swayed from side to side as the mechanism which operated the stabilizing by means of the ends of the planes, counteracting the puffs of wind from the land, did its work with an intelligence almost superior to that of man himself.

"Now," remarked Sinclair, flattered by the appreciative looks on our faces, "imagine that she is sailing along there, carrying death under her wings in the shape of my aerial torpedoes, or even plain ordinary bombs."

Far off we could see a speck seemingly detached from the aeroplane. It fell rapidly with gathering momentum. Suddenly it touched the water and a huge cloud of foam rose.

It did not take a very vivid imagination to supply the context to such a supposition. I had already begun to look on Sinclair with a feeling almost akin to awe.

He depressed another key. The aeroplane turned, obeying his every whim. He depressed keys in quick succession. She cut a figure eight.

"Why," he cried in his enthusiasm, "I can do anything with that aeroplane you want. I have even turned her completely over and flown her upside down just as Pegoud did first. Look—you never saw that before."

"Exactly. I can use the gyroscope for that—to make her hover in one spot just like a bird, riding the air waves, if you can call it that. Why, man, there isn't anything I can't do with this machine."

"No, I have guarded against that," he said, starting the aeroplane again, turning it and directing it straight back at us like a huge, irresistible force sweeping at us and beyond our power to stop—yet obeying absolutely the magic touch of the little keys before him. "I am the only person who can interfere with it—I who know how to direct it."

Sinclair in his enthusiasm over the machine itself had forgotten the very occasion of our being there.

"No—you're right," he answered. "And for God's sake—get back that secret," he implored, as he brought the machine on down the bay back to its nesting place.

I was thrilled not only by his tone, but by the momentous possibilities in this long electric arm that could be stretched out through space to fight our battles.

Kennedy's words sent a horror-stricken thrill through me. What if that arm were stretched out against us, instead of for us, in war?

V. — THE ARCHEOLOGIST

"THIS thing has begun to take on the nature of an epidemic," exclaimed Craig that afternoon after luncheon as he glanced at the early edition of the evening papers which had arrived at Westport and had been delivered to Colonel Sinclair. On the first page stared the headline:

Prof. Friedrich Neumeyer, the famous archeologist and student of Mexico, was found dead among his treasures this morning by the caretaker of his apartments at — West —th Street.

He had evidently returned late during the night and, instead of going directly to bed, had sat down to read, when he was suddenly stricken in some unknown manner....

There was much more to the account, and the mystery with which the Coroner surrounded the affair had evidently impressed the newspapers with the idea that they had a big story.

"First it is Valcour," he exclaimed in unfeigned alarm, "now Neumeyer. Where will it end? Why, Neumeyer and I were old friends. He has visited me often out here. We have traveled together in Mexico. In fact it was with his assistance and advice that I gathered many of these curios which you see in this very room."

He waved his hand about at the wonderful collection he had made, for he was no mean student himself.

"A great man—Neumeyer," he continued, rummaging among some papers, "a student and a practical man, both."

"That's the sort of man he was," he said, spreading the letter out. "I don't mind you fellows knowing this, for I can trust you not to let it go further. These are letters he wrote me from Mitla several months ago, before the present trouble became so acute down there that he had to leave for New York."

The letter certainly showed that the two had been on intimate terms. The Professor wrote:

Among other wonders of this place, I have been very much interested in a cavern, or, as the natives here call it, a "subterráneo." It seems to have been built in the shape of a cross originally. Each arm of the cross probably extended about twelve feet underground.

Tradition says that the center was guarded by a block of stone called "The Pillar of Death." There is a superstition repeated from mouth to mouth that whoever embraced this stone would die before the sun went down.

I was also interested in learning that tradition says that from this cavern there once led a long underground passage across the court to another underground chamber which was full of Mixtec treasure. Treasure-hunters have dug around it, but nothing has ever been discovered. According to the gossip of the region, two old Indians are the only ones who know of the immense amount of buried gold and silver, but will not reveal it.

"That's the sort of fellow Neumeyer was," commented Sinclair thoughtfully, "always delving about and bringing up something not only of scientific value but of practical value as well. I'm going up to the city with you, if you are going," he added.

Kennedy had already despatched a wire to Dr. Leslie, telling him where we were and asking him to hold things in their present condition until we could get back.

THE coroner was waiting for us at the station when we arrived. "I'm glad to see you," he greeted us after the introductions were over. "I've been trying to get you, Kennedy, all day."

He was plainly perplexed and made no effort to conceal it as he hurried us into his official car which was waiting there.

"Such a sight as I saw when I got there," he exclaimed as we crowded into the car and sped uptown. "There, in his big desk chair sat Neumeyer, absolutely rigid, the most horribly contorted look on his face that I have ever seen—half of pain, half of fear.

"Before him lay a book of beautiful colored plates of inscriptions published by the National Museum of Mexico City. He had evidently been studying them.

"Well, I walked over and bent down to touch him. His hand was cold, of course. As nearly as I could make out, he must have been dead six or eight hours at least, perhaps longer."

Sinclair had been listening intently but had said nothing. He was impatient of every delay, but at last we reached Neumeyer's.

The Professor had occupied a back room and an extension on the first floor of a private house which he rented, using the extension as a study and miniature museum of his own.

We entered the little private museum which all night had guarded its terrible secret. The very atmosphere of tragedy in it sent a shudder over me, and Sinclair was nervous and shaken.

Kennedy began at once by examining the body which had been moved by the Coroner from the chair and was lying, covered up, on a couch.

In the fleshy part of the back of the neck, just below the left ear, was a round, red mark, with just a drop of now coagulated blood in the center.

Kennedy said nothing, but squeezed out from the little wound on Neumeyer's neck a few drops of liquid on another little glass microscope slide from the emergency-case in his pocket.

"You say most of his work had been carried on in Mitla?" asked Kennedy, looking about at the crowded room.

"Not all of it," replied Sinclair. "A year ago he was in Yucatan. But this year he had been in Mitla, until the rebels made it dangerous. After that he spent some time at the pyramids near Mexico City, but even that became dangerous and he came back here. But it was Mitla that he was most interested in."

"Then I wish that you would look through the room and see if there is anything missing. I am going outside in the back yard under the windows to look about."

In the yard Kennedy first looked about to get the general bearings of the house. It was several houses in from the corner, but comparatively easy to reach over the back-fences from the side street.

Under the window of the extension, which had been back of and a little to one side of Neumeyer's chair, was a clump of bushes, and as Kennedy approached, in order to see whether it would be possible to climb up to the window, he pushed aside the fronds of leaves.

Suddenly he bent down, I thought at first to look for footprints. Instead, he picked up a short cylinder, an inch or so long and a little more than half an inch in diameter. It was on what looked to me like a thin reed stick three or four inches long, and the cylinder itself was of a light buff-brown.

He gave a glance upward which assured him that it was entirely possible for any one of somewhat more than ordinary agility to reach the window-sill by a leap and then pull himself up to it. Then he released the bushes and rejoined me.

Kennedy was looking at the little reed stick, on the end of which was the small buff-brown cylinder. He turned it over and over, noticing a place where a minute fragment had evidently been broken off.

Finally he dug his nail into it. The mass was comparatively soft. As he rubbed his nail gingerly over the tip of his tongue, he puckered his face and quickly rubbed his tongue vigorously with his handkerchief, as if the taste had been extremely acrid.

"Even that little speck that adhered to my nail," he observed, "makes my tongue tingle and feel numb yet."

He turned without a word further and reentered the house, mounting the steps to the quarters occupied by Neumeyer.

"Have you discovered anything yet?" he asked of Sinclair who was still busily engaged going over the archeologist's treasures.

"I can't say," answered Sinclair slowly. "There was an inscription over which Neumeyer and I had puzzled a great deal—on a small block of porphyry. I don't see it."

Mitla, as I already knew, was south of the city of Oaxaca, in the state of that name; and there, I recalled, were situated the properties and the railroad interests of Sinclair, in which Mrs. Hawley had told us she too was interested.

In the ruined palaces of Mitla was the crowning achievement of the old Zapotec kings. In fact, no ruins in America, I had heard, were more elaborately ornamented or richer in material for the archeologist.

As Kennedy himself looked about, we could see that Neumeyer had brought up porphyry blocks on which was much hieroglyphic painting, peculiarly well preserved in that dry atmosphere. There were many sculptured stones and mosaics. Here were jugs, there were cups, vases, all sorts of utensils. Many of the articles had a religious significance, and there were little figures of gods and sacrificial stones. In fact there was packed on shelves and into corners of the room enough stuff almost to equip a fair-sized museum.

One thing I noticed now which had not attracted my attention at first in our surprise. It was an idol, a hideous thing, which sat on the desk directly in front of where Neumeyer had been seated. Squatted and coiled about it were frogs and snakes.

I could not help feeling that this terrible image was a fitting piece to have accompanied the gruesome occupant of the narrow room during his long vigil. Indeed, the mere sight of it sent a shudder over me. If I had been inclined to the superstitious, I might certainly have been pardoned for believing that it had in some way wreaked its revenge upon the man for having disturbed the resting-places of the private and public deities of this long-dead race. However, not being superstitious, I knew that it must have been something very much alive, though diabolical in its nature, which had really been the cause of the tragedy.

"Did the Professor have any visitors yesterday?" asked Kennedy as the caretaker paused on the threshold of the now ghastly little room, completely unnerved by the tragedy that had been so close without her apparently knowing it. "Did you see any one about who looked suspicious or hear any noises?"

"In the afternoon," she replied slowly, "a rather pretty, dark woman called and asked for the Professor. She seemed very disappointed when she found that he was out."

"Well, I can't say, sir. She might have been partly Spanish, but she was different from most of them."

"No. But she seemed to be much interested in seeing him. She asked several questions about him and then went away. That was all I saw of her and I didn't see any one else about."

"I hardly place much reliance on what she says," remarked Kennedy when she had gone. "She's too near-sighted. It might have been a Mexican Indian for all we know. That's usually the way. The people who have a chance to help you are so unobservant."

"I'll tell you, Kennedy," he confessed after a moment, "that's a good deal the way I feel about this case. I'm far from satisfied with the progress that my own assistants are making with that Valcour case, too."

I saw a half smile of satisfaction flit over Craig's face. He had expected it. But the flicker was only momentary and quickly suppressed.

"As far as they can determine," went on the Coroner, "there is absolutely no clue to her death. I thought at first that it must be a poison. But if it is, it must have been one of the most subtle, for apparently every trace of it has vanished."

"I know she could not have been asphyxiated, as I told you at the Vanderveer, for there was no illuminating gas in the room. Yet in some respects she looked as if she had been. I have gone over all the possibilities of suicide and of poisoning, but—"

"Hardly. She looked strong that way. No—off hand, unless you have discovered something yourself, I shouldn't be inclined to say that it was anything organic."

"Then too," he resumed, "they tell me she was intimate with a lot of these refugees from Mexico. I have thought it might be some new kind of tropical disease."

"I must confess that I don't know. The fact is I had my own theory about it until not long ago. That is why I wanted to see you so much after this Neumeyer affair occurred too."

"What do you mean?" asked Craig, evidently bent on testing his own theory by the weakness of that of some one else. "What was your idea?"

"I thought at first," pursued Dr. Leslie, "that we had at last a genuine 'poisoned needle' case. In some respects it looked like it."

"But," objected Kennedy, "clearly this was not a case of white slavery or anything of that nature. No, it impresses me as a case of murder pure and simple. Have you tested for the commonly used poisons?"

"Yes, and there was no poison," he said, "absolutely none that any of our tests could discover, at least."

A silence of a few moments ensued, in which the coroner was apparently turning something over in his mind, seeking just the way to phrase it. Kennedy said nothing.

"You realize, Kennedy," said the coroner at last, clearing his throat, "that we have no very good laboratory facilities of our own to carry out the necessary investigations in cases of homicide and suicide. We are often forced to resort to private laboratories. Now, sir—if we might— appeal to you?"

"Thank you," responded Dr. Leslie, evidently much relieved, for he had been thinking of the time when a few days hence the newspapers might be criticizing his office for not having obtained results.

He gave some orders regarding the disposition of the body of Neumeyer, and we left the house together with Sinclair who had fallen into a brown study.

"I shall send the necessary materials to your laboratory," concluded the coroner as we parted.

Sinclair seemed to have nothing that he could add to what had already been discovered and we left him, after finding out at what hotel he usually stopped. Burke too excused himself, saying that he had a few matters that he wanted to run down personally.

"Why should any one want to steal old tablets of Mixtec inscriptions?" I asked thoughtfully of Kennedy as we left the others. "As nearly as I can make out, that is about the only motive that any one has even suggested for the murder of Neumeyer. Surely they couldn't have a sufficient value, even on appreciative Fifth Avenue, to warrant murder."

"As far as that goes," replied Kennedy sententiously, "it is incomprehensible. Yet we know that people do steal such things. The psychologists tell us that they have a veritable mania for possessing certain curios. However, it may be possible that there is some deeper significance in this case," he added, his face wrinkled in thought. "For instance, there was that letter Neumeyer wrote to Sinclair. He might have discovered something that really had a practical value."

It was, to me, a new aspect of the affair that an archeologist might possess something that appealed to the cupidity of a criminal.

"Then too," went on Craig, "there is the problem of who this mysterious woman-caller may have been. I thought it might be Ruiz—but I doubt it. At present I'm inclined to believe that it was some one whom we-haven't yet connected with the case. At any rate, I think tonight I'll see what sort of welcome we may get at the cabaret. Are you game?"

I was now thoroughly aroused to solve the riddle. The further we went the more incomprehensible it seemed. How and by whom the beautiful Madame Valcour and now Professor Neumeyer had met their deaths seemed to me to remain as great a mystery as ever.

VI. — THE MESCAL PARTY

OUR second visit, that night, to the Mexican cabaret was more cordial than the first. As yet none of them suspected anything, and it seemed that we had made a good impression before and now found that we had established ourselves on a footing at least of intimacy.

Thus it came about that we had no difficulty in being seated at the table where we knew was to be the party which later would adjourn to a private dining-room upstairs. We even felt emboldened to do a little visiting on our own account from table to table, praising Señora Ruiz for her dancing, exchanging light banter with Mrs. Hawley, and even chatting for a few moments with Sanchez who, however, seemed to be morose and moody.

It was not difficult to imagine the cause, and even if it had been, Mrs. Hawley would have supplied the reason.

Sanchez sat silent for the most part, and once Mrs. Hawley leaned over and remarked—

Señora Ruiz danced with a fire which surpassed even that of the night before, but it had no effect on Sanchez. He seemed to be engrossed in something else, far away. Ruiz was careful not to intrude on his thoughts, but I fancied that there was a sort of elation in his face. I am sure that Hattie Hawley felt no extraordinary sorrow over the news. The fact was, as nearly as I could make it out, that Valcour had been a trouble-maker for both of them. She had, evidently, had all the men at her beck and call, and the others were not sorry, at least, to have a formidable rival removed, although whenever her name was mentioned there were general expressions of concern and sympathy.

The cabaret was going as if nothing had happened, but one could not help observing that the group of friends were quite sobered by the quick succession of deaths of frequenters of the place. We listened intently to the conversation, but no one, at least openly, claimed to have been intimate with either Valcour or Neumeyer, although the mystery surrounding their deaths could not but have its dampening effect.

I looked about from time to time expecting that Sinclair might drop in, as long as he was in town, but evidently he was avoiding the place.

"Neumeyer must have been a very interesting man," ventured Craig in a lull in the conversation when it had drifted around to the situation outside the capital of Mexico.

"He was," chimed in Mrs. Hawley. "Most of us, though, had more interest in modern Mexico than in the past—except Colonel Sinclair. By the way, I wonder why he isn't here tonight? He is in town."

"Indeed?" remarked Kennedy innocently. "I wish he would drop in. I have heard so much about him lately that I would like to know him better."

Sanchez for the first time seemed to show some interest in the conversation, as he caught the name of Sinclair, but he said nothing.

"I'm just as well satisfied," put in Senora Ruiz with a slight shrug of her pretty shoulders. "I like Colonel Sinclair—but he is all business—business—railroads, mines and mines and railroads. There are other things in life besides business."

I could not help comparing the two women. Hattie Hawley was of the type that admired a man for the very things that did not interest Ruiz. Yet I must say that Ruiz interested me.

As the evening advanced, the life of the cabaret became more and more lively. Everywhere now I could overhear references to the two causes célèbres of the day, but they were of a different character, inspired mostly by curiosity, and some of them even morbid.

Ruiz had repeated her dances of the night before with her accustomed success, and after being generously applauded and welcomed by the various groups had disappeared upstairs. One by one several others followed, including Sanchez. Mrs. Hawley, who had been talking to some friends near the door, disappeared up the steps too.

WE had passed a not unenjoyable evening, but we had really learned nothing, and I was about to remark the same to Craig who, I imagined, was scheming how he could get upstairs without exciting suspicion, when our waiter, who by this time felt that he had a sort of proprietorship in us, approached and bent over us.

"They are asking upstairs whether you would care to join them?" he inquired deferentially.

We rose and followed the waiter out of the door. As we mounted the steps and reached the upper hall, I noticed a little sort of office in an alcove, and behind a small desk a dozen or so pigeonholes for letters. Evidently the cabaret conformed to the law, outwardly at least, and had a hotel license.

Down the hall the waiter paused, and as we came up with him threw open a door into a fair-sized dining-room, beautifully furnished. Señora Ruiz received us politely and we were ushered in. Several persons were seated either about the table or in easy chairs.

One, to whom we were introduced as Señor Alvarez, had been playing on the piano as we entered—a curious rhythmic, monotonous melody. There was also a Señorita Guerrero whom we had not met, a soft dark-eyed beauty of a more refined type than Ruiz. Sanchez was there, of course, and Mrs. Hawley.

"Usually we have a large party here," remarked the latter, "after the cabaret closes, for we can stay here as late as we please without interference from the police. But tonight we are rather few, unfortunately."

Kennedy responded with some courtly remark which quite won the smiles of the ladies, for the Latin-American loves those little touches that round off the edges of social intercourse.

"That was a most curious piece of music I heard as we came in," he added. "Might I inquire what it was?"

"It is a song of the Kiowa Indians of New Mexico," responded Señora Ruiz. "Señor Alvarez was with the Federals when they were driven across the border, and one day before he came up to New York I believe he heard it. He has endeavored to set it to music so that it can be played on the piano. That monotonous beat that you hear in it is supposed to represent the tom-toms of the Indians during their mescal rites." She paused, then added, turning to me, as I happened to be nearest, "Will you try a little mescal?"

"Mescal?" I repeated. "Oh yes, to be sure. It's the Mexican brandy, isn't it? I never tasted it or pulque either."

"Oh," she replied quickly, "the mescal that I mean is not that terrible drink. It is quite different—the peyote bean, perhaps you have heard it called. The drink is horrible stuff that sends the peon out of his senses and makes him violent. The mescal that I mean is not only a shrub—it is a—a religion."

"Yes, it is almost that among the Indians," remarked Sanchez who seemed to have regained something of his own manner. "The mescal cult, if you choose to call it that, has spread widely in New Mexico and Arizona among the Indians, and even northward. I understand your Government has forbidden the importation of the plant and its sale to the Indians under severe penalties. Still, the sale grows, they tell me. I don't think it is any worse than some of the whisky they sell—not so bad, for the whisky is beastly. Will you try it?"

On the table now I noticed that there lay some round, brown disk-like buttons, about an inch in diameter and perhaps a quarter of an inch thick. They were exactly like those which Kennedy had found in the chatelaine of Valcour, and it was with the greatest effort that I managed to control my surprise. I watched Kennedy to see what he would do, but his face betrayed nothing.

Señora Ruiz took one of the little buttons out of the tray and carefully pared off the fuzzy tuft of hairs on the top. It looked to me very much like the tip of a peculiar cactus plant, which in fact it was. Then she rolled it up into a little pellet and placed it in her mouth, chewing it slowly.

The others followed her example and we did the same. Mentally I determined to follow Kennedy's lead.

"The mescal shrub," remarked Alvarez as he joined us, "grows precisely like these tittle buttons which you see here. It is a species of cactus which rises only half an inch or so from the ground. The stem is surrounded by a clump of blunt leaves which give it its button shape. On the top, still, if you look carefully, you can see the tuft of spines, like a cactus."

"It grows in the rocky soil in many places in the northern Mexican states," continued Alvarez, "and the Indians, when they go out to gather it, simply lop off these little ends that peep above the earth. They dry them, keep what they wish for their own use and sell the rest for what to them is a fabulous sum."

"It has to be smuggled across the border," smiled Mrs. Hawley, "but we don't mind that."

I HAD scarcely swallowed the bitter, almost nauseous thing than I began to feel my heart action slowing up and my pulse beating fuller and stronger.

For the moment I was a little bit alarmed, thinking of the tragedies that had so recently taken place, but I reflected that Kennedy would not try anything that was dangerous. Still, I could see the pupils of his eyes dilate, as with a dose of belladonna, and I suppose mine must have done the same.

It was not long before I began to feel a sense of elation, of superiority—as if it were I, not Craig, who was engineering this case. I did nothing to carry my new idea either into word or action, and afterward I learned that that feeling was a common experience of mescal-users, that they sometimes actually did perform wonderful feats while they were under the influence of the drug.

But the feeling of physical energy and intellectual power soon wore off. I was glad to recline in an easy chair in silent indolence.

Then for an enchanted hour followed a display which I am totally unable to describe in language that can convey to another the beauty and splendor of what I saw.

I closed my eyes. By a strange freak of fancy I thought I saw that hideous, grinning idol which had been standing on Neumeyer's desk. All about it played long tongues of red and golden flame. I opened my eyes hastily. The vision was gone.

I picked up a book. It seemed that a pale blue-violet shadow floated across the page, leaving an after-image of pure color that was indescribable. It was a blue such as no worker in art-glass ever produced.

Still seeing that marvelous blue, I replaced the book and again closed my eyes. A confused riot of images and colors, like a kaleidoscope, crowded before me—golden and red and green jewels in a riot of color. I gazed—with closed eyes—and still I could see it. I seemed to bathe my hands in incomparable riches such as I had never dreamed of before.

It was most peculiar. All discomfort ceased. I had no desire to sleep, however. Instead I was supersensitive. And yet it was a real effort to open my eyes, to tear myself away from the fascinating visions of color.

I looked upward at the ceiling. It seemed that the gas jets of the chandelier, as they flickered, sent out waves, expanding and contracting, waves of color. The shadows in the corners, even, were highly colored and constantly changing.

Alvarez began, lightly, to play the transposed Kiowa song, emphasizing the notes that represented the drum beats. Strange to tell, the music itself was actually translated by my brain into pure color!

The rhythmic beating seemed to aid in the transformation. I fell to wondering what the ignorant savages thought, as they sat in groups about their flickering camp-fires while others of the tribe beat the tom-toms and droned the strange, weird melody. What were the visions of the red man as he chewed his mescal button and the medicine men prayed to the cactus god, Hikori, to grant a "beautiful intoxication"?

At another end of the room was a cluster of light-bulbs which added to the flood of golden effulgence which suffused the room and all things in it. I imagined for an instant that the cluster became the sun itself, and I actually had to turn my head away from it and close my eyes.

Even then, just as if I had been gazing at the sun, the image persisted. Suddenly it changed. I saw the golden sands of a beach blazing with a glory of gold and diamond-dust. I could see the waves of incomparable blue flecked with snowy white foam, rolling up on the sands. A vague perfume was wafted on the air. I was in an orgy of vision. Yet there was no stage of maudlin emotion. It was at least elevating.

Color after color, vision after vision succeeded, but in all there persisted that vision of gold. Whether it was something in the drug or whether it was some thought of gold subconsciously cropping up, it was nevertheless there.

Kennedy's experiences, as he related them to me afterward, were similar. When the playing began, a beautiful panorama unfolded before him—the regular notes of the music enhancing the beauty and changes of the scenes which he described as a most wonderful kinetoscopic display.

As for myself, I longed for the power of a De Quincy, a Bayard Taylor, a Poe, to do justice to the thrilling effects of the drug. I can not tell half, for I defy any one even to dictate, much less recall, more than a fraction of the rapid succession of impressions under its influence. Indeed, in observing its action I almost forgot, for the time, the purpose of the visit, so fascinated was I.

Then suddenly I would see that hideous face of the Mixtec idol when I closed my eyes, would see its slimy frogs and snakes, twisting, squirming. Now it seemed to laugh, to mock, now to menace and threaten.

Señora Ruiz advanced toward us. The spangles on her filmy net dress seemed to give her a fairy-like appearance. She seemed to float over the carpet, like a glowing fleecy white cloud on a rainbow-tinted sky.

Kennedy, however, had not for a moment forgotten the purpose of our visit which was to get more information. His attention recalled mine and I was surprised to see that when I made the effort I could talk and think, apparently, quite as rationally as ever. Still, the wildest pranks were going on in my mind and vision.

Some one had ordered a liqueur and the waiter was slow in responding. Kennedy rose and volunteered to go downstairs and get some action, and I followed.

AS we passed down the hall, we came to the little alcove-office, with its letter boxes. "Evidently the habitués are accustomed to receiving letters here," he remarked, pausing.

We looked about. There was not a soul in sight. Quickly Kennedy stepped over to the letter-box. As he ran his eye over some of the letters, he picked out one postmarked two days before and addressed to Madame Valcour. Kennedy went hastily over the letters in the other compartments, now and then selecting one, and without more ado slipped them into his inside pocket. Then we went downstairs and found the waiter.

When we returned, Alvarez had started the music again and for the moment I yielded to it and became oblivious to all but the riot of color which the peyote bean had induced.

Every time Señora Ruiz moved about, she seemed to be clothed in a halo of light and color. Every fold of her dress radiated the most delicate tones.

Yet there was nothing voluptuous or sensual about it. It seemed to raise one above earthly things. Men and women were now brilliant creatures of whom I was one. It was sensuous, but it was not sensual.

I remember that I looked once at my own clothes. My every-day suit was, I thought, exquisite. My hands were covered by a glow as of red fire that made me feel that they must be the hands of a demi-god at least.

Señora Ruiz was offering some more of the mescal to the others when there floated into my vision another such hand. It laid itself on mine and a voice whispered in my ear—

"Walter, we have had enough. Come, let us go. This is not like any other drug— not even the famous hasheesh. I have found out all I want."

As we left the cabaret the return to the world was quick. It was like coming out from the theater and seeing the crowds on the street. They, not the play, were unreal for the moment. But strange to say I felt no depression as a result of the mescal intoxication, although for a long time I could not shake off that sense of seeing blue and red and golden.

"What is it that produces such results?" I asked as Kennedy hurried along until we found a night-hawk cab.

"The alkaloids," he answered, directing the cabman to the laboratory, late though it was. "Mescal was first brought to the attention of scientists, I believe, by explorers of our own Bureau of Ethnology. Dr. Weir Mitchell and Dr. Harvey Wiley and several German scientists, as well as Mr. Havelock Ellis, have investigated it since then. It is well known that it contains half a dozen alkaloids and resins of curious and little-known nature and properties."

"You think it was the poison used?" I asked, my mind reverting to the cases of Valcour and Neumeyer.

"Hardly," he replied. "Of course, I haven't had time to investigate that, but I should say the poison in those cases was much more violent, off-hand."

Our cab made excellent time in the deserted streets and we were rapidly being carried uptown to Craig's laboratory at the University.

As the effect of the mescal began to wear off in the cool, fresh night-air, I found myself thinking more clearly, yet in a peculiar, questioning state of mind.

Nothing much had been said. If our new acquaintances had any guilty knowledge they were certainly keeping close-mouthed about it, even when off their guard among themselves.

VII. — THE BURIED TREASURE

LATE as it was, Kennedy insisted on plunging into work in his laboratory. To all appearances the mescal had had no great effect upon him, and indeed I myself felt nothing except a lassitude which I knew I could overcome by an effort of will, if the occasion demanded.

I watched him indolently, however, and as nearly as I could make out he was working over what looked like an X-ray tube, though of a different pattern from any that I had seen before.

"Yes," he replied scarcely looking up from the apparatus. "These are what are known as 'low' tubes. They give out the so-called 'soft' rays."

He did not seem disposed to interrupt his work to talk and I kept silent, wondering why he was working so feverishly.

At last he was ready to go ahead and I was glad of it, for the pungent odor of ozone from the electrical discharge was not adding to my physical comfort.

Kennedy had placed the letter that had been addressed to Valcour in the machine, radiographed it, then rapidly laid aside the plate and placed another letter in it, repeating the process. The second letter, I observed, had been addressed to Sanchez and was postmarked Mexico City several days before. Quite evidently Sanchez and the rest of the party had, in the suppressed excitement of the day and evening, neglected to look in the letter boxes to see whether there was anything for them. It was a fortunate opportunity of which Kennedy was taking advantage, though it aroused my curiosity to know just what he was doing.

I was on the point of breaking my silence and asking when he volunteered the explanation himself.

"The possibility of reading the contents of documents enclosed in a sealed envelope," he explained, "has already been established by the well-known English X-ray expert, Dr. J. F. Hall-Edwards.

"Dr. Edwards has been experimenting with the method of using the Roentgen rays recently perfected by a German scientist. By this new method radiographs of very thin substances, such as a sheet of paper, a leaf, an insect's body, may be obtained. These thin substances through which the rays used formerly to pass without leaving any trace on the sensitized plate can now be radiographed."

He pointed to some examples of the work he had already done on other cases to show what results might be expected when he developed the plates in this. I looked closely. On the negatives it was easily possible to read the words inscribed on the sheet of paper inside the envelope. So admirably defined were all the details that even the gum on the envelope and the very edges of the folded sheets inside the envelope could be distinguished.

"Any letter written with ink having a mineral basis can be radiographed," went on Craig, still working over those which he had abstracted from the cabaret. "Even when the sheet of paper is folded in the usual way it is possible by taking a radiograph stereoscopically, as I am doing, to distinguish the writing. Every detail stands out in relief. Besides, the pictures of the writing can be greatly magnified and, with the help of a mirror where it is backed up, what is written can be accurately read if you are careful."

He had completed his work and it had taken only a few minutes to do it. As he finished he handed me the letters.

"Walter," he said, "while I am going ahead here, I wish you would take that cab back again to the cabaret. Get in there again, if you can—make some excuse about having lost or forgotten something—then watch your chance and restore these letters to their pigeonholes before any one notices that they are gone. You needn't come back. I have just a little more to do here and I'll meet you at the apartment. I think by tomorrow that I shall have something interesting to show you."

I hurried back to the Mexican cabaret and succeeded in getting past the look-out who was posted at the door after the regular closing time by telling him that I had made a mistake and taken the wrong hat when we left. He nodded and I mounted the stairs.

Down the hall I could hear sounds from the private dining-room that told me that the mescal party was still in progress. I did not wait, however, for to be seen again would certainly arouse suspicion. It was the work of only a moment to return the letters, and without being seen by any of the party I reached the street door again and with a smile bade the look-out good night.

Kennedy did not come in until some time after I reached the apartment, and then only because there was nothing else that he could accomplish that night.

HE was up early in the morning, looking eagerly at the papers, but there was nothing in them that had any bearing on the cases that interested us.

Kennedy was much excited when I met him later in the morning in the laboratory. He had been endeavoring to decipher the letter that had been written to Valcour.

"It was from Morelos," he cried, showing me the copy as he had pieced it together from the radiograph.

Evidently it was written hastily the night of the tragedy, before the writer had heard of it. It read:

I tried to get you tonight, but did not succeed. I hope nothing is wrong. It would be too bad if there should be a slip this time as there was when you had the blue-prints of the Corregidor at Manila, only to lose them on the street in Calcutta. Please let me know as soon as you can what has happened. I dream of you always and of the day when this trouble will be over. I do not dare write more and only this because I do not know whether I can reach you at the hotel or not.

"Burke has just called up," he went on. "Fortunately I was able to read him the letter. He could make nothing of it. But he told me he had been making inquiries, both of the Government and among the newspapers that are best informed on Mexican affairs. Morelos is one of the rebel junta here in New York. They have a headquarters down on South Street, and as soon as we can get a chance I want to go down and look them over. Just at present, though, these letters seem to be the most important thing."

Kennedy shoved over to me the copy, as he had made it out, of another of the letters.

"It is to Sanchez and arrived only today, after being delayed and crossing the ocean twice in order to get past our blockade down in Mexico. I think you will find that sufficiently interesting."

According to rumors that reach me here in the capital, my friend Señor Alvarez will be in New York probably by the time you receive this. He will undoubtedly call on you and I know that you will treat him with every courtesy. He has been deeply in the confidence of the Government and has traveled all over as a confidential agent. Just before he went to the Northern States, he was in the capital, having completed a tour of the Southern States to ascertain the true state of public sentiment.

It is about that that I wish to write. While down there he passed through Mitla some months ago where he met a Professor Neumeyer. It is rumored that Neumeyer has succeeded in smuggling out of the country a very important stone which bears an inscription. I do not know, but depend on you to look into the matter and to let me know whether there is anything in it.

According to the story, Neumeyer took advantage of the disturbed situation down in Oaxaca. Of course, as you know, the inscription, if there is one, is really the possession of the Government.

You will find that Señor Alvarez, in addition to being a man of affairs, is a learned antiquarian and scholar. Like many others down here now, he has a high regard for the Japanese. As you know, there exists a natural sympathy between some Mexicans and Japanese, owing to what is believed to be a common origin of our two races. Señor Alvarez has been much interested and, I am told, is engaged in a special study of the subject.

In spite of the assertions of many to the contrary there is little doubt left in the minds of students that the Indian races which have peopled Mexico were of Mongolian stock. Many words in some dialects are easily understood by Chinese immigrants. A secretary of the Japanese Legation here was able recently to decipher old Mixtec inscriptions found in the ruins of Mitla.

Señor Alvarez has been much interested in the relationship and, I understand, is acquainted with a Japanese curio-dealer in New York, named Nichi Moto, who wishes to collaborate with him on a monograph on the subject. If he publishes it, it is expected to have a powerful effect on public opinion both here and in Japan.

In regard to the inscription which Neumeyer has taken with him, I rely on you to keep me informed. I do not know its character, but it may interest either Colonel Sinclair or the Japanese. In either case you can see how important it may be, especially in view of the forthcoming mission of General Francisco to Tokyo.

"Some one down at that Mexican cabaret knows more about the death of Neumeyer than appears on the surface," I remarked. "What do you suppose the inscription really was about?"

"Well," considered Kennedy thoughtfully, "Mexico is full of historical treasure. As you might gather from the letter, the Government, to all intents and purposes, says to the scientist, 'Come and dig.' And then when he finds anything, the Government steps in and seizes the finds for its own national museum. The finder never gets a chance to keep his discoveries. It isn't difficult to see that Neumeyer thought that this was the time to smuggle something out of the country."

"Rather a dangerous proceeding, evidently," I remarked, thinking of the tragedy that had overtaken the savant.

"Yes, even now it could not be done without exciting all kinds of rumors and suspicions."

"I can only guess," he answered after a bit. "You recall the remark we overheard Neumeyer make the night we saw him and the letter Colonel Sinclair read us?"

"You have read of the wealth that Cortez found during his conquest of Mexico?" Kennedy went on. "Did it ever occur to you what had become of the gold and silver of the conquistadores?"

"The Indians believe so. Sinclair believes so. That, in my opinion, accounts in large measure for his interest in archeology of the brand that Neumeyer practised."

"There are persons," he resumed, "who would stop at nothing—not even at the murder of German-American savants—murder of their own colleagues—to get such a secret."

"Yes," he resumed, "there is a possible clue in that. Suppose some one had discovered the mysterious place where Montezuma or some of those other old kings obtained their gold, or better yet the place where they hid great quantities of it from the Spanish invaders? That place has never been revealed. I have heard a great deal about it. Some say it is in Guerrero, others in Cuernavaca, but there is no one who really knows."

"Possibly," Craig answered. "It may have been gold—not ore, but actual bullion or golden ornaments, vessels, plates, anything— that Neumeyer was seeking to locate."

"Could Sinclair have known the secret, too?" Tasked, recalling now the intimacy between the two men, and the ill-concealed anxiety of Sinclair when we were looking over Neumeyer's effects on the day of the murder.

"Quite likely," acquiesced Kennedy. "I have had Burke watching Sinclair himself since he came to New York. I don't know that the Colonel has been quite frank with us on everything."

"Not when I called up this morning," replied Kennedy. "Sinclair has seen no one since we left him except Mrs. Hawley."

"A man of rare ability," remarked Kennedy, "a past master at the art of intrigue. Sanchez is a typical soldier of fortune, but Alvarez has the polish of the man of the world. Burke tells me he is one of the most trusted of the agents of the Federal Government. He has been in New York only a few days. But as far as I can see there isn't much to connect him with the case."

Kennedy had been clearing away his X-ray apparatus and was still revolving the matter of the letters in his mind.

"There may be something more to it than even the stolen plans of Sinclair's machine and this conjecture of buried treasure," he remarked at length, when he had finished. "Alvarez evidently has an eye on international relations. I wonder if we can't get a line on him in that way? We must find that curio-shop of Nichi's."

"Here it is," he remarked, as he ran his finger down the list of N's. "It's a slender chance, but let us go down and look over the yellow peril."

VIII. — THE CURIO-SHOP

ANYONE seeking articles of beauty and value will find the antique shops of Fifth and Fourth Avenues and some of the side streets a veritable mine of riches.

We had no trouble in locating Nichi Moto's. It was a small, quaint, dusty rookery, up a flight of steps, in an old row of frame houses which must have been just about paying the owner enough to cover the taxes against the day when the land value would have risen and a sky-scraper would replace them.

A gilt sign swung in front of the shop, and as we entered we noticed that the yard in front, for the houses sat back some distance from the sidewalk, was adorned with little dwarf trees and other Japanese plants.

I could not help being impressed by the peculiarly unimpressive exterior which gave little hint of the wealth of beautiful articles that were housed in the most artistic interior.

Kennedy and I sauntered in, just like any other connoisseurs who had no special object yet were always on the lookout for something that might appeal to their tastes.

It was still comparatively early and the shop was as yet deserted, but the polite and smiling Nichi advanced to meet us with a ready bow and an inquiry as to what was our honorable pleasure.

"Oh, we are just looking about," explained Kennedy, "picking up a few things here and there for a den."

"You are welcome," Nichi invited, showing back of the inevitable smile a row of perfect, pearly teeth and a keen eye. "You could not have come to a better or more reasonable place. You will find everything just as it is represented."

Kennedy thanked him and commenced browsing around among the objects, about which indeed one did not have to exaggerate in order to praise.

There seemed to be everything imaginable in the shop. Beautiful cloisonné enamel, articles in mother-of-pearl, lacquer, and champleve enamel crowded splendid little koros, or incense-burners, vases, tea-pots.

One could feast his eye on enamels, in-crusted, translucent and painted. Some were the work of the famous Namakawa of Kyoto, others of Namakawa of Tokyo. Satsuma vases, splendid and rare examples of the potter's art, crowded gorgeously embroidered screens with the sacred Fujiyama rising in the stately distance.

"Is there nothing in particular I can show you?" reiterated Nichi, eager to talk about his wares.

As we walked about slowly examining the articles, Nichi busied himself about the shop, always alert to answer a possible question and clinch a possible sale.

Now and then I glanced at him covertly out of the corner of my eye, so as not to let him catch me scrutinizing him. He was a small, wiry chap, like many of his race, with an impassive, expressionless face and beady, watchful eyes.

The more I looked, however, the less I felt that I knew or could know about him. I can not say whether it was the very blankness of his features that impressed me, or whether there was something there which we of the West could never fathom.

KENNEDY and I had gradually worked our way toward the back of the shop when I heard Craig remark as if in surprise—

"Why, Walter, look at these perfectly stunning Mexican curios over here in this corner."

I followed his gaze and found that, sure enough, set apart from the other things, was indeed a very passable collection of Mexican objects of art.

There were objects there that told of both the ancient and modern in the wonderland to the south of us. Little figures of clay depicting all phases of the life of the people, made in Guadalajara, basket-work, and bead-work were interspersed with antiquities, a few idols, ornaments, jewels and utensils of the Aztecs, Toltecs and Mixtecs.

"I have heard that you are interested in Mexican art, too," ventured Kennedy, turning to him.

"Indeed? Who has told you?" inquired Nichi deferentially, but with well concealed curiosity.

"I have many friends from Mexico," hastened to explain Craig. "Some of them meet down at the Mexican cabaret. I suppose you are acquainted with the place? I have heard your name mentioned by them now and then, and I determined if I was ever in this neighborhood with a few minutes to spare to drop in and make the acquaintance of one whom they valued so highly."

"I am delighted, I assure you, to make your acquaintance," responded Nichi, "and I hope you will thank my kind friends down there. Who is it that you know?" he asked, not committing himself.

"I can't say just who it was that I heard mention your place," replied Kennedy guardedly, "but I know several of them— Señora Ruiz, Señor Sanchez, Mrs. Hawley— oh—and of course Señor Alvarez who has just come to New York."

"Yes," responded Nichi, "I have been in Mexico and the art is—what is it you call it—a hobby—with me."

"Señor Alvarez seems to be exceptionally well-informed on the antiquities," continued Kennedy.

"Yes," agreed Nichi colorlessly. "I intended to expand my business and deal in Mexican articles, too. This was the beginning. But," he added with a shrug of his shoulders and a deprecating smile, "this unpleasant affair with your country came along and—well—I scarcely think Mexican things will be popular for some time, unfortunately."

"A remarkable man, Señor Alvarez," persisted Kennedy, seeking to draw Nichi on. "A diplomatist and a scholar, at once."

"There is much culture in Mexico which you Americans do not know," ventured Nichi, adroitly changing the subject.

He was inscrutable to me. Kennedy gave up for the moment the attempt to lead the conversation lest he might arouse suspicion. Evidently he considered that Ni-chi's welcome was too good to spoil by forcing it.

We turned again to the Japanese objects, as perhaps less risky for the present. As we wandered toward the other corner of the back of the shop, Kennedy noticed, behind some bronzes of the Japanese Hercules destroying the demons and representations of other mythical heroes of the race, a large alcove or tokonoma.

Nichi was evidently very proud of it, for he was at pains to point out to us the panels decorated with peacocks, storks and cranes. It seemed to have an exotic atmosphere, and the carvings and lacquer about it added to the illusion. On one side, also, was a miniature representation of a chrysanthemum garden.

Carved hinoki wood framed the panels and the roof of the artistic bower was supported by columns in the old Japanese style. In fact the whole seemed to be a compromise between the very simple and austere and the polychromatic. The dark woods, the lanterns, and the floor tiles of dark red, the cushions of rich yellow and gold, all were most alluring.

We thanked him, and Nichi, with a glance around that took in the front door and showed no other customers, went to a stairway in the rear and called down to what must have been a basement, "Otaka!"

Evidently those were the living-quarters of the curio-dealers, for a moment later a peculiar looking, almost white attendant appeared and Nichi spoke a few words to him in their own language.

Forthwith Otaka disappeared and promptly produced four glasses and some rice-brandy on a tray with some little cakes. The brandy was poured out and Kennedy pledged our better acquaintance.

It was delightfully foreign to New York to sit in such a bower and I felt almost as if we should soon see a dancing geisha-girl or something that would complete the feeling one had of being transported suddenly across the Pacific. The sounds of street traffic and the distant rumble of an elevated railroad through an open window destroyed the feeling, however.

Nevertheless, there was plenty to think about. There, for instance, was Otaka, taking his own saké, quietly, apart from us.

I could not help watching him drink, for it was done so strangely. First he took the cup, then a long piece of carved wood which he dipped into the saké. He shook a few drops on the floor, to the four quarters, then with a deft sweep of the stick lifted his heavy mustache by means of the piece of wood and drained off the saké at a draft.

Those peculiar actions attracted my attention to him, and I saw that Kennedy, although carrying on a conversation with Nichi, now and then stole a glance in that direction.

OTAKA was a peculiar man, of middle height, with a shock of dark, tough, woolly hair, well-formed and not at all bad looking. He had a rather more robust general physique and I could not help comparing him to Nichi and thinking perhaps he was a meat-eater and not wholly confined to the regular Japanese diet.

His forehead, too, I noticed, was narrow and sloped backward, the cheek-bones prominent, the nose hooked, broad and wide, with strong nostrils. His mouth was large, with thick lips and a not very prominent chin; his eyes dark gray and almost like those of a European.

"They are very much excited down at the cabaret," I overheard Kennedy remark. "I suppose you have read in the papers of the deaths of Madame Valcour and Professor Neumeyer? They used to come around often, and we met them there."

Nichi seemed to have unbent a little, an effect which was due perhaps to the sociability of the saké. Still, he was not to be caught off his guard and Kennedy did not try to press the questioning.

"Yes," he assented, "I read the American papers and have read of it. It is not a wonder that they are excited. Who would not be in their places?"

"I can make nothing of it from the papers," remarked Kennedy very truly, for the papers were floundering about even more hopelessly than Dr. Leslie had been when he appealed to Craig.

"Otaka, take away the empty cups," ordered Nichi, and the attendant hastened to carry out the order.

I knew that Kennedy was longing to ask whether Alvarez had been around to call on him, but at each attempt to ask naturally Nichi seemed to be able to change the subject. I could not help feeling an admiration for the skill of the little curio-dealer in keeping us to the open and avowed purpose of our visit to his shop, and, though he did not betray it, I knew how chagrined Kennedy must be at every baffling turn.

We rose to continue our inspection of the place. There were ivories of all descriptions. Here was a two-handed sword of the Samurai, with a very large ivory handle, a quaint scabbard and a wonderful steel blade.

Kennedy seemed keenly interested in the collection of warlike implements on this side of the shop. He reached over and picked up a bow. It was short and very strong. He held it horizontally, as if for shooting, and twanged the string.

Then he examined with interest an arrow, about twenty inches long, and thick—made of cane with a point of metal very crudely fastened to it. He fingered the deep blood groove in the scoop-like head of the arrow and looked intently at a reddish brown incrustation on it.

"I thought the Japanese law prohibited that?" remarked Kennedy, balancing the arrow.

"It does," hastened Nichi. "Such arrows are rapidly growing extinct. I see you are well acquainted with things Japanese. That is what makes it valuable."

Kennedy considered the arrow and bow critically, holding them up together to get the effect, as if they were hung on a wall.

"I'll take it," agreed Kennedy, laying it down as if he were not quite satisfied and wanted to buy something more expensive but had not the money. "It will be just the thing for my den. I like things that are odd and different from what others buy."

"Oh, never mind sending it," said Kennedy. "It is light and I am going directly home. I can carry it just as well."

We spent five or ten minutes more looking about and then, as some other customers appeared in the doorway, we bowed ourselves out, promising to come when again Nichi received a new consignment which he had been expecting from the Orient.

"He was an Aino, one of the aborigines who have been driven by the Japs northward, into the island of Yezo."

"No. Most ethnologists, I believe, think of them as a white race, nearer akin to Europeans than to the Asiatics. The Japanese have pushed them northward and now they are trying to civilize them."

"Otaka looked comparatively civilized for an aborigine," I ventured, "except for that peculiar ceremony with the saké."

"Perhaps. But on their native heath they are a dirty, hairy race. Evidently when they are brought under civilizing influences they adapt themselves to the new environment. They say they make very good servants. Still, they are really of the lowest type of humanity—of the very dregs!"

"No," he replied. "I have been told that they are a most inoffensive and peaceable people, good-natured and amenable to authority. But they become dangerous when they are driven to despair by cruel treatment, which probably accounts for some of the notions that exist about their barbarity. The Japanese Government has lately become very considerate of them—though I don't believe all Japanese are. Still, they say the Japs like the Aino women for wives."

We took a surface car uptown again to the laboratory where, sticking in the letter-slot of the door, we found a message from Burke. It read:

"Walter, there is no use of your wasting time the rest of the day. I have a lot of things to do here in the laboratory. I see Dr. Leslie has sent up the materials he promised, too. Incidentally drop in and see McBride at the Vanderveer. Don't tell him too much, but just let him know that we are making progress.

"Don't forget — eight o'clock — Bowling Green," he concluded, his coat off already, plunging into the investigations he had planned in his workshop of scientific crime.

IX. — THE GUN-RUNNERS

TO one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street, whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horse-car now ambles slowly uptown and trucks and carts are all day long in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day and deserted and even vicious-looking by night.

But there is another fascination about South Street that does not appear on the surface to the casual observer, and it was that fascination I saw now.

Perhaps there has never been a serious difficulty in Latin America which has not, in some way or other, been connected with this street whence hundreds of filibustering expeditions have started. Whenever a dictator is to be overthrown, or half a dozen olive-skinned generals are banished and become eager for a share in the official gold lace again, the arms and ammunition dealers in South Street can give, if they choose, an advance scenario of the whole film—tragedy or comic opera. Real war or opéra bouffé, it is all grist for the mills of those close-mouthed individuals.

"I've been following up Morelos," replied Burke as he hurried us along down the street. "I've just learned that the Revolutionists are preparing to ship a large amount of arms and ammunition down to Mexico as well as a lot of machinery for the making of money for the rebels. According to the information I have, it is to go on a tramp ship, the Arroyo, tonight. The papers are all made out and she is supposed to sail with the tide tonight, carrying a cargo of corn and oats."

"I think not. But if we can catch them red-handed, the laws against gun-running are pretty severe—a matter of a possible ten years' imprisonment, a fine and forfeiture of the cargo. What I want to do is to scout about and when they begin to move the stuff in trucks, or just before, swoop down on them."

Burke had led the way to a dingy cafe which we entered. Through a half open door which disclosed a dirty back-room we could catch a glimpse of several men seated about a round table. Only a glance was sufficient to identify them as the typical oily plotters of war.

Morelos, however, who was seated with his back toward us, seemed to be of a different stamp from the others. He was an athletic-looking man, comparatively young, with a well-formed head covered with black hair, crisp and curly, skin the color of a well-smoked meerschaum and a small black mustache which masked a mouth that was cruel even when it was smiling. His eyes were large and brilliant and extraordinarily piercing.

There was an air of suppressed excitement in the back-room of the cafe, and, having satisfied himself that Morelos was there, Burke quietly motioned to us to follow him out again before we were ourselves observed.

"Where is the ship?" asked Kennedy as we gained the street and followed Burke, keeping as much as possible in the shadow.

"Up the river a few piers," he answered. "Let us look it over and see what they are doing."

It was a foggy and misty night on the water, an ideal night for the gun-runner, and fortunately, such a night as aided us in watching their mysterious preparations.

On the Arroyo every one was evidently chafing. Below decks I could imagine that the engineer and his assistants were seeing that the machinery was in perfect order. No doubt men were posted in the streets to give warning of any danger and report the approach of the big lumbering trucks which were to convey the arms from the storehouse, wherever it was, to the ship.

Kennedy strained his eyes to peer through the fog. Out in the river was a tug, watching, to give warning of a possible police-boat. It was dreary waiting, and we drew our coats more closely around us as we shivered in the night-wind and tried to brace ourselves against the unexpected.

"I have notified the police-boat Patrol to be ready on the river for the signal," whispered Burke hoarsely, in answer to our questions as to what preparations he had made for the emergency.

THE minutes sped by and lengthened into hours. At last the welcome muffled rumble of heavily laden carts disturbed the midnight silence of the street.

At once a score of men sprang from the hold of the ship, as if by magic. One by one the cases were loaded. The men were working feverishly by the Light of battle-lanterns—big lamps with reflectors so placed as to throw the light exactly where it was needed and nowhere else. They were taking aboard the Arroyo dozens of coffin-like wooden cases and bags and boxes, smaller and even heavier. Silently and swiftly they toiled.

It was risky work, too, at night and in the tense haste. Once there was a muttered exclamation. A heavy case had dropped. A man had gone down with a broken leg. It was a common thing with the gun-runners. They expected it. The victim of such an accident could not be sent to a hospital ashore. He was carried, as gently as the rough hands of the men could carry anything, to one side where he lay silently waiting for the ship's surgeon who had been engaged for just such an emergency. There was no whimper.

Scarcely a fraction of a minute had been lost. The last cases in this load had been taken aboard, and the tug was crawling up to make fast and tow the ship out into the stream the moment the next consignment arrived and was loaded. Already the trucks were vanishing, empty, one by one, in the misty darkness, as muffled as they came, going back for the last load.

"Come," cried Burke, springing out of the shadow of the warehouse where we had been crouching. "We shall catch them at both ends—on the ship and at their storehouse."

He had leaped up on a pile of timber alongside the dock and was blowing shrilly on his police-whistle.

SUDDENLY lights flashed through the fog on the river. There was the Patrol shooting out from a bank of fog that swirled around a slip several piers away and ranging up alongside of the Arroyo before it had a chance to make a getaway.

"We can leave them to the police," cried Burke, hurrying us now along the street in the direction of the trucks, going for their second load. "I want Morelos."

It had all happened so suddenly that the gun-runners had no chance to cover up their retreat. As we ran down the street we could see the trucks standing before a building on the block above the dingy cafe in which we had first seen the plotters.

Without pausing, Kennedy and Burke dashed up to the door, while from the direction of the ferry we could hear a couple of policemen hurrying toward us. We entered unopposed. The conspirators had taken to their heels at the first sounds of Burke's whistle and the blasts of the police-boat.

IT was a ramshackle building to which we came, reminiscent of the days when the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an age when no subsidy or free tolls were necessary for the American merchantmen who flew our flag on the uttermost of the seven seas.

On the ground-floor was an apparently innocent junk-dealer's shop, in reality the meeting-place of those whom we had been seeking. By an outside stairway the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque with decades of dust.

It was really a perfect arsenal and magazine into which we entered. The long room was dusty and cobwebbed, crammed with stands of arms, tents, uniforms in bales, batteries of Maxims and mountain-guns and all the paraphernalia for carrying on twentieth century guerrilla warfare.

As we reached the top of the steps, Burke ground out an oath. The loft was deserted. A moment later he had sprung down the steps again, and, joined by the policemen who had answered his call, made a dash into the cafe in the back room of which we had seen Morelos.

Kennedy, however, did not follow, for in the light of a dim oil-lamp he had seen that this was the real secret meeting-place of the Revolutionist junta. It was a chance not to be missed and he lost no time in rummaging through the warlike paraphernalia in search of anything that might lend a clue to the cases which had brought us into this strange adventure.

Far in the rear of the loft, underneath some old and dirty tarpaulins, he at last unearthed a letter-file and carried it closer to the light. "This will interest Burke," he exclaimed, as he ran over hastily a number of letters and bills which showed how the Junta had been carrying on its contraband traffic in arms in violation of the embargo that had been established both across the border and at the gulf-ports of Mexico.

He had drawn out from the file several letters in a dainty foreign hand on the embossed notepaper of the Vanderveer. They were addressed to Morelos. One, evidently the latest, began:

We have succeeded! The plans of the gyroscope air-ship have been stolen from Sinclair and today they will be given to me for safekeeping until I can get out of New York with them quietly and without exciting suspicion. That is the story I gave them. Now, Ramon, it is for you to plan how we are to manage to take them ourselves. It must be done soon, for they may change their plans and demand them back from me at any time. So far they have the utmost faith, however. Let me hear from you at the earliest moment how we are to get them out of the country and hand them safely over to the Revolutionists. With a million kisses from your devoted—Valcour.

"Yes," exclaimed Kennedy. "Don't you see it all now? The beautiful little Frenchwoman was a Constitutionalist spy working among the Federals. It was her plan to steal that invention of Sinclair's from them and hand it over to her lover Morelos."

"Then you think Morelos got it after all— and sacrificed his lover?" I asked, recalling that cruel mouth under the black mustache.

"I think nothing—yet," he answered, tucking the letter-file under his arm. "Let us find Burke."

"Confound the luck!" ejaculated a familiar voice as we stumbled down the poorly lighted stairs from the loft to the street a moment later and ran into the detective. "Morelos slipped through our fingers, somehow. He wasn't on the Arroyo—I knew that. I thought we'd get him here or at the cafe-—but he was too old and slippery at the game."

"Perhaps that may prove some compensation," remarked Kennedy, quietly handing over the letter-file. "I have kept out only these notes."

"Whew!" whistled Burke as he read the notes from Valcour. "That puts a new light on the whole affair."

"Without shedding a ray, yet, on the perpetrator," added Kennedy. "Do you realize that we don't even know how she met her death?"

"I shall have to leave this end of the affair to you entirely, for the present, Burke," said Kennedy with a glance at the Junta headquarters and a sweep of his hand down the street toward the captured ship. "I shall be at the laboratory early in the morning, if you want me. But I can't see that we can help you down here, now, at all."

IT had been a strenuous night, though only partly successful, and I was glad of Kennedy's decision to get at least a few hours' rest in our apartment after what we had gone through during the past few days.

Kennedy retired when I did, but he could not have slept very long, for, although I was awake early, he had gone already and left a brief scrawl that he would be at the laboratory.

"I wish you'd get Leslie on the wire," he greeted me a few minutes later when I rejoined him, "and ask him to drop in as soon as he can."

I did so and then gazed curiously on his table, littered with chemicals, jars, beakers and test-tubes.

As nearly as I could make out, he had been examining the little buff cylinder on the end of a reed.

I watched him break off a little piece and pour on it a dark liquid from a brown glass bottle. Then he placed it under a powerful microscope.

"Microscopically," he remarked slowly, "it consists almost wholly of minute clear granules which, as you see, give a blue reaction with iodine. They are starch. Mixed with them are some larger starch granules, too, a few plant cells, fibrous matter and other foreign particles—and then there is that acrid, numbing taste, you recall."

"Aconite," he replied, "of which the active principle is the deadly poisonous alkaloid aconitin."

Kennedy had opened a standard work on toxicology and indicated a passage for me to read:

Pure aconitin is probably the most actively poisonous substance with which we are acquainted, and if administered hypodermically the alkaloid is even more powerfully poisonous than when taken by the mouth.

As in the case of most of the poisonous alkaloids, aconitin does not produce any decidedly characteristic post-mortem appearances. There is no way to distinguish it from other alkaloids, in fact no reliable chemical test. The physiological effects are all that can be relied on.

Owing to the exceedingly toxic nature, the smallness of the dose to produce death and the lack of tests for recognition, aconitin possesses rather more interest in legal medicine than most other poisons. It is one of the few substances which in the present state of toxicology might be criminally administered and leave no positive evidence of the crime. If a small but fatal dose of the poison were to be given, especially if it were administered hypodermically, the chances of its detection in the body after death would be almost nil.

"I am convinced that the murders have been committed by the use of aconite," replied Kennedy slowly.

I glanced at him quickly, as the diabolical nature of what had taken place sank into my mind. Here was a poison that defied detection, a criminal so clever that he might never be brought to justice.

"There are more ways of catching a criminal, Leslie," he said quietly, "than are set down in the text-books."

X. — THE AIR TERROR

DR. LESLIE had scarcely left us when the door to the laboratory was flung open and Burke dashed in with a telegram which he spread open before Kennedy, adding—

It was from Sinclair, who had returned to Westport, and was evidently written in haste and without regard for tolls.

COME OUT IMMEDIATELY. HAVING TROUBLE WITH MACHINE I WAS TO DELIVER TO GOVERNMENT. BRING KENNEDY.

"Can't say," answered Burke. "The train service is rotten in the middle of the day, though. We can't get anything until noon. Can you go?"

"I shall have to go, I imagine," replied Craig, deliberately cleaning up his laboratory-table.

"How about the mechanicians he employs?" I asked, voicing a thought which I had had before, but had not expressed.

"There's only one," answered Burke. "I've watched him, and I'm convinced that he's as honest as gold. That was why I said nothing about him when we were out there before. No, this Sinclair affair was an outside job, all right, though what could have happened now is more than I can guess."

"Nothing yet. We landed the goods and a lot of the men last night, after you left, but so far no Morelos. By the way, before I got that message from Sinclair I thought I'd nose around that Mexican cabaret. The waiter up there tells me it is pretty deserted. That's another reason why I am anxious to go to Westport. It's barely possible that some of your friends, Ruiz and the rest, may be out there."

Kennedy had finished his clean-up and together we left the laboratory, much to Burke's relief, and made our way to the station.

We were all in a state of impatience by the time we reached Westport, and fortunately Sinclair had taken care of expediting matters by having his car meet us at the depot. The quick spin through the country restored our equanimity and by the time we reached Sinclair's we were ready to plunge into work again.

"What's the matter?" asked Craig as we pulled up and the inventor came rapidly across the lawn to meet us.

"Matter enough," he returned. "Everything seems to be going wrong, and I'm hanged if I can see any reason for it. Just as if I didn't have troubles enough already, the aeroplane won't work properly. Let me show you what I mean."

He led the way over to the hangar where on a runway or slide rested the airship.

"I have been all over the thing," he explained. "There isn't a part of the machine I haven't gone over. I can't seem to find anything wrong—and yet—it doesn't work right."

Sinclair finished the examination of the machine which he had been engaged in when we arrived, then led the way to the little kiosk from which he controlled it.

"Now—just a moment—I'll show you what I mean," he said as he tested out his apparatus for wireless control.

The engine of the aeroplane had already bean started. He depressed the right key. She rose and sailed away gracefully. So far, I could see nothing wrong.

"It's all right at the start," he remarked, peering out anxiously at the machine. "It's only after it has flown a while that things begin to go wrong."

Sinclair was depressing lever after lever and the machine was obeying his will as accurately as if he himself had been sitting in it at the wheel.

"Everything looks all right," Sinclair repeated. "Yes indeed—it looks fine to me —when I depress the key to make a turn to the right and the machine deliberately rises and not content with that volplanes down almost to the water. Yes—it may look all right, but it is not all right."

"Not a bit of it. I might just as well have no control over it at all now. It's a wonder to me how I ever got the thing back here the last time. Only a lucky chance, I guess."

I don't think I ever felt more sorry for any one in my life than I did for Sinclair just then. Here was the work of years, the child of his brain, as it were, going wrong. I glanced at his tense face; it was tragic.

"Even the signals she repeats back are wrong," he added in despair. "The thing is absolutely out of my control."

Before any of us could speak there came a sudden swoop of the machine. Down, down, down she dropped rapidly.

Sinclair was vainly endeavoring to manipulate the keys that ought to have controlled her. But it was no use. Down she planed, gathering momentum.

"Confound it!" he muttered, turning to Kennedy in despair. "What can be the matter? You saw her work the other day."

The gyroscope-aeroplane had swooped down to the sand-spit and in a cloud of sand had buried her nose deeply into the beach.

"You can thank heaven for telautomatics, at least," muttered Sinclair blankly. "At any rate, no one was in the machine."

We gazed at each other aghast. There was one great unanswered question in all our minds. Whence had come the impulse that had sent the airship to her fate?

Sinclair did not reply. As for Kennedy, he was still looking at the wireless detector. I knew enough to understand that tremendous impulses of wireless energy had in some way been let loose in the air. Still, Kennedy said nothing.

The sand-spit was on the same side of the bay as ourselves, in fact was the point of land that rounded off the miniature cape on which Sinclair lived between the bay and the Sound.

Already Sinclair, followed by Kennedy and ourselves, had started down toward the wrecked aeroplane.

IT was a pathetic sight to see the graceful mechanical bird lying there in the sand, her wings broken, a mass of scrap.

What it was that had caused the catastrophe none of us knew. Had it been some part of the machine itself that had been tampered with?

Craig was turning over the wreckage carefully. To me it seemed a hopeless quest even to try to read the cause of the disaster in such an apparently hopeless mess. Yet, as Kennedy looked it over, I began to fancy that to him it merely presented new problems for his highly deductive and scientific mind.

"The gyroscope is out of business for good," he remarked, as he examined the dented and battered aluminum case. "But there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it except what would naturally happen in such an accident as this."

He continued to examine the machine, aided by Sinclair, more nonplussed than ever.

"The engine is a mass of junk now," continued Kennedy with great interest. "See how the cylinders are bent and twisted. The gasoline-tank is intact but dented out of shape. No, there was no explosion there."

"Why," cried Sinclair, looking also, "the wires in it are actually fused together. The insulation has been completely burned off. What do you suppose could have caused that?"

Kennedy shook his head and continued to regard the tangled mass thoughtfully for some time.

Then he turned to Sinclair as we began slowly to retrace our steps to the house and said—

Sinclair nodded, speechless, scarcely able to realize that his life-work had been so completely destroyed at a time when he was convinced that he had succeeded.

None of us spoke until we neared the workshop again for, indeed, there was nothing that we could say.

Once Kennedy dropped back with Burke and spoke a few words, but it was not about the airship, for a moment later he caught up with Sinclair and myself who were plodding along in silence.

"I believe I'll take a run about the harbor this afternoon," he remarked. "I'd like to have a look at the Seaville House."

"You can take my new runabout, the Streamline," replied Sinclair mechanically.

THE Streamline was a three-stepped boat, as fast as an automobile would have been on land. Sinclair had had her built more for pleasure than for racing, and she was a beautiful craft, managed much like a racing-car.

He drove the boat himself, and it seemed that in his chagrin at the untoward accident of his aeroplane he took pleasure in letting the Streamline out just to show what he could do. As she started, the purring drone of her eight cylinders sent her feathering over the water like a skipping stone. She sank back into the upturned waves of her own making, her bow leaping upward, a cloud of spray in her wake, curling out like a waterspout on either side.

Even if we had not had the excitement of the day to key us up it would have been exhilarating to shoot down the bay in this buzzing, throbbing shape of mahogany and brass, with her exhausts sticking out like funnels and booming like a pipe-organ.

"Do you want to stop at the hotel?" asked Sinclair after what seemed could hardly be more than a few seconds.

He was seated back of Sinclair, busily engaged with Burke in comparing notes and taking in just how things were situated at Seaville.

"There is the cottage where Ruiz stays," pointed out the detective, indicating a pretty little place on the side of the hill, just above the hotel and cut off from it by a clump of trees which had been cleared in front of the cottage and did not obstruct the splendid view down the harbor.

Kennedy surveyed the cottage through a glass, as Sinclair rounded the turn at the head of the harbor and started back.

Among the first things that had caught his eye was what looked very much like the primitive inverted V aerial of a wireless telegraph on the gabled roof.

"Is there a wireless-station near by?" asked Kennedy, leaning forward to speak to Sinclair.

"Yes," he called back. "There is the Seaville station. You can see it in a moment when we round this bend in the shoreline."

The Streamline covered space, it seemed to me, almost as rapidly as one could talk, for it was but a moment when we could see, a few miles distant, facing the Sound, the powerful Seaville station, with its tall steel masts of the latest inverted L type. Beneath we could distinguish a cluster of little houses, including the plant and the living-quarters of the operators.

Sinclair headed the runabout toward the station, and in almost no time we were there.

We left the boat at a float and walked up the dock. Sinclair already was acquainted with those in charge of the station, and it needed only an introduction and a few minutes' chat from Kennedy to place us on a most friendly footing.

A WIRELESS-PLANT is always interesting. There is something fascinating about this power of man to reach out into the air and to snatch down messages from the invisible.

The men at the station, too, had seen the accident to Sinclair's gyrosocope airship and were eager to know just what happened. Kennedy and Sinclair managed to satisfy their curiosity without telling too much, however, and Craig gradually worked about to asking some questions of his own as soon as he could do so.

"This is a pretty powerful plant," remarked Kennedy. "I don't suppose you are troubled much by interference?"

"Not usually," replied the operator. "But we have been during the past day or two."

"It's been pretty bad sometimes," he went on. "At first I thought it might be amateur operators, but it was too powerful for any mere amateur. Sometimes the impulses have been terrific."

Kennedy said nothing. He had taken from his pocket a pencil and was writing on a blank form a message, now and then gazing out on the water as he tried to compress the words without sacrificing the clearness.

"I haven't any time to waste," he remarked, as he finished correcting the message. "Can you get this off right away to the city?"

The operator read it over carefully. It was a message to one of Kennedy's students at the University, directing him to get out some apparatus at the laboratory which Craig described and send it off by the late afternoon train for Westport.

"Burke and I will meet the train, Mr. Sinclair, if you will let us take your car for an hour or so."

"You may take anything," acquiesced Sinclair, "if it will help in clearing up this case."

"Just a moment and I will be ready to go back to the house with you," said Kennedy, as he left us for a further talk with some of the men at the wireless-station.

He was gone much longer than a moment, and when he returned he had several packages which he had succeeded in borrowing from the station on the strength of Sinclair's friendship.

Kennedy wasted no time on our return, but set to work stringing wires, using a windmill on the Sinclair place for the purpose.

Kennedy accepted his services, more I think to keep him busy and out of the way than anything else. Burke and I watched in silence, Burke especially impressed, for he had not seen as much of Kennedy as I had and seemed to think his every action savored of some black art of detection.

At last, the wires being strung, Kennedy unwrapped a package which he had brought over from the wireless-station and began testing it and setting it up in the little kiosk.

Some parts, I thought, looked very much like a very sensitive microphone, but there were other parts that reminded me of a phonograph, particularly one that looked like the cylinder record.

"Won't there be any—interference?" I ventured, thinking of what I had heard so often in our talks with wireless-operators.

Kennedy smiled. "No," he said, "for I am only going to listen. I am not going to send—at least not by this means," he added, adjusting its apparatus.

"Wireless apparatus," he continued, "consists, roughly speaking, of three parts. First as to the sending, there is the source of power, sometimes a battery, sometimes a dynamo. Then there is the making and sending of wireless-waves, the key, spark condenser and tuning-coil. Finally there is the receiving-apparatus—head-telephones, antenna, ground and detector. Just now all that I am planning to use is one side—the receiving."

Kennedy had finished his work, and as for a few minutes he rested he gazed out contemplatively over the beautiful bay which the low-falling sun made more entrancing than ever.

"Is there a searchlight down at Seaville?" he asked, at length, turning to Sinclair, "for if there is not we shall have to get one."

"There is one on the end of the dock of the Westport Yacht Club, about half a mile from the hotel," he answered, pointing out the club with its long dock and float.

"You are a member, I see," noted Kennedy with a glance at the club burgee flying from the Streamline.

"Excellent," exclaimed Kennedy. "While Burke, Jameson and I go down to meet the train, I wish you would take the boat and run over to the club. I want to use the searchlight tonight, and by the time you have that arranged I think we shall be able to meet you there. That will be fine, just far enough from the Seaville House not to arouse suspicion, in case there is some one there who is watching us by this time.

"Come, Burke," he added, rising suddenly as if at last a plan of action had shaped itself in his mind. "We had better be going. There are a lot of things that we must arrange—and I want to fix it so that you can be ready for quick action if anything happens tonight."

XI. — THE RADIO-DETECTIVE

KENNEDY, Burke and myself hustled over to the railroad-station and there were met by Kennedy's messenger, carrying the packages he had ordered from his laboratory by the wireless courier of the air. We piled them into the rear of the car and a few moments later were speeding to rejoin Sinclair at the Yacht Club.

The club was a large square building, extending out into the water on made land, from which ran a long, substantial dock at the end of which was a platform with a flag and alongside it a searchlight.

We entered the club and, without going up through the large porch where the "rocking-chair fleet" was anchored, went directly down the dock to Sinclair whom we could see on the platform.

"Did you see Mrs. Hawley as you came through?" inquired Sinclair as we greeted him.

"Why, no," replied Kennedy, evidently a little put out, for he had chosen the yacht club because, even though there were bound to be many people there and much gossip, still it was not like the Seaville House.

Kennedy did not look around, but continued to busy himself on the end of the dock. I wondered whether she might have been sent out by some one up at the hotel to watch.

"I suppose we'll have to speak to her as we go out," added Kennedy, "but let us finish here quietly first."

Craig had set up on the platform a large affair which looked very much like a mortar. I watched without saying anything, dividing my attention between it and the splendid view of the harbor which the end of the dock afforded.

"It's a light-weight rocket-mortar," replied Kennedy, who impressed Burke into service and was explaining something to him in an undertone. "By the way, Sinclair, did Mrs. Hawley say anything about any of the others being down here?"

"I believe that Sanchez and Señora Ruiz and their Japanese servants are at the cottage," reported Sinclair.

Kennedy had next uncovered a round brass case. It did not seem to me to amount to much, as compared to some of the complicated apparatus which Craig had used. In it was merely a four-sided prism of glass, as if it had been cut off the corner of a huge glass cube.

It surely was about the most curious piece of crystal-gazing I had ever seen. Turn the thing any way I pleased and I could see my face in it, just as in an ordinary mirror.

Craig covered it up and gave it to Burke, who assisted him in carrying some other bulky pieces of apparatus as well as another similar brass case containing a second prism down to the Streamline.

It was now getting dark, and just before we were ready to start Kennedy proposed that we all should go up and pay our respects to Mrs. Hawley.

AS it happened it was the night of a dance at the club, and members and their guests were already assembling. It was a brilliant spectacle, faces that radiated pleasure, gowns that for startling combinations of color would have pleased the Futurists, and music, already tuning up, that set the feet tapping irresistibly.

I shall not pause to describe the scene, for the fascination of the ballroom overlooking the bay, on which now a myriad of lights on the boats twinkled, was absolutely wasted on Craig, and indeed has no part in the story. In front of the club was strung out a long line of cars and at the dock now were several speed-boats of national and international reputation, besides Sinclair's Streamline.

Mrs. Hawley was indeed surprised to see us, but as far as I could detect there was no element of suspicion in it.

"They were tired of the city," she added as she repeated what Sinclair had already told us of Ruiz and the rest. "I thought I might as well come down, too, and I have rooms at the Seaville. Some acquaintances there who are members of the club asked me if I wouldn't like to come down here, so here I am."

Kennedy had been watching her keenly. Quite contrary from being disconcerted at meeting us she seemed to be pleased, especially at seeing Sinclair.

"Wasn't it too bad about the airship?" she added. "I heard them talking about it up at the hotel and I asked Mr. Sinclair, but he didn't seem to know what caused the accident himself."

"No," replied Kennedy. "It was most unfortunate, whatever it was. By the way, I wonder whether any of your friends intend to be here tonight?"

"I think not," she answered frankly. "You know they are very clannish. They live much to themselves. You can't blame them. They're a good deal like we are down in Mexico, you know, with our own American clubs."

Kennedy had arisen and was looking over the gay crowd, but apparently did not find any faces there that he recognized. We chatted a few moments more, then excused ourselves and went down the dock to the boat.

"Either she doesn't know anything or she is a mighty good actress," I commented, falling in with Craig.

"Whatever she knows or doesn't know," he answered, "there is one thing I am sure of. That woman may be depended on to do nothing that would hurt Sinclair. Did you notice? She scarcely took her eyes off him."

WE had reached the end of the dock, and Sinclair's presence forbade pursuing the subject further. It was only a matter of a few seconds and the engine was started. Kennedy had been talking earnestly with Burke and was the last to jump into the boat.

"No," replied Craig. "There are several things here that I want him to do, and in the meantime we must get back to your house."

We left Burke standing on the end of the float and made a quick trip down the bay to Sinclair's.

As we walked up the flight of steps that surmounted the terrace, Kennedy asked—

"Yes," answered Sinclair somewhat mystified, for he at least was in no mood for entertainment.

"Unless I'm mistaken," remarked Kennedy, "I think I shall find something here that will keep us busy for at least a part of the evening and take our minds off our troubles a little bit."

He had diverged off toward the kiosk and the wireless-apparatus which he had rigged up during the afternoon. Loosening the wires, he carried the apparatus bodily with him into the house where Sinclair had the phonograph in his splendidly equipped library.

"This is what I might call my radio-detective," explained Kennedy with just a trace of pride in his voice, as we entered. "Even if it is mainly improvised, I think it is built up on a very compact system and ought to prove efficient."

He had taken the thing apart and from it abstracted the cylinder which I had observed. Brushing it off, he slipped it on the phonograph like an ordinary record.

"Everybody knows, I suppose," he said, pausing and turning to us, "that messages by wireless may be received from any number of stations by using an aerial pole and other apparatus properly.

"Laws, rules and regulations have been adopted to cut off interlopers and stop busybody ears. But, as a matter of fact, nearly everything that is transmitted by the Hertzian waves can be snatched down from the very sky by other wireless-apparatus.

"An operator, his ear-phone clamped to his head, may drink in news conveyed surely and swiftly to him through wireless-signals, plucking from the air secrets of war and," he added significantly—"love."

Kennedy paused a moment over the word, whether to catch some reaction from Sinclair or not I could not make out.

"In other words," he continued, dropping back suddenly into his usual scientific manner, "such apparatus might be used for eavesdropping by a wireless wire-tapper, and I concluded that if there was any of that sort of thing that could be done I would do it. Let me see what result I have from this radio detective-work."

As he adjusted the cylinder, he explained: "You see now why I wanted to visit the wireless-station, for I am using Marconi's new radiotelephone. In connection with his receivers, Marconi uses phonographic recorders and on them has captured wireless telegraph-signals sent out over hundreds of miles.

"That is to say, he has found it possible to receive wireless-signals, although ordinary records are not loud enough. He uses a small microphone on the repeating diaphragm and connected with a loud-speaking telephone. At first there was trouble getting a microphone that would carry a sufficient current without burning up. There were other difficulties, too, but all have been overcome, and with this apparatus which I have here it is possible now automatically to record wireless-messages and actually make them audible."

The very idea of the thing, capturing the noiseless impulses in the air and repeating them so that our finite ears might hear them, seemed incredible.

He translated it rapidly, but it did not seem to be of any interest to us, being simply a message from some one at the Seaville House to a friend on one of the Sound steamers as it passed Westport. Still, although it did not satisfy our curiosity, it was wonderful enough. More than ever, it seemed that he was doing the impossible, for before us buzzing and ticking forth, were message after message which his radio-detective had actually dragged down by magic out of the clouds.

Kennedy would try a message, find that it had no interest for us, then move the needle ahead to pick out the next.

Suddenly he stopped, started the phonograph again at the beginning of a series of ticks and cried—

I was unable to read the ticking myself but, realizing that it must be something of importance, I bent over Kennedy as, with Sinclair, he set down what the radio-detective had caught.

&EHRANSTHWIAOTYLTEIDXYNG
NNSDTEWDOYANRECHSTAEWNERI
BCESTESRESTEYSOLECOMUETNRO
LDOYEBNHYNUTGOMEMOSUECTOT
SEUEANLPOCENSCLNLRAIS.

Kennedy looked vacantly at the message. It appeared to be a mere jumble of letters.

"I can't say," replied Kennedy. "And yet why should any one send a message like that unless it were in a cipher and he had something to conceal?"

There was no disputing Kennedy's reasoning. It must be a cipher-message, though from whom and to whom and what it contained not even the marvelous radio-detective could tell. I wondered whether Kennedy could fathom it.

Craig wrote it out, reversed, and read off the letters slowly, but that did not seem to do any good. It was no plainer forward than backward.

I felt like urging haste, but when I considered how helpless I would be myself, I realized that such urging would come from me with very ill grace.

"Can't you apply the rules that are usually used in deciphering ciphers?" asked Sinclair. "For instance, you know E is the most commonly used letter. How many letters are there and what is the most commonly used? That must stand for E."

"Exactly what I am trying to do," replied Kennedy quietly, his brow still puckered in thought as he bit the end of a pencil nervously. "There are eighteen E's here already. E itself is here the most commonly used letter, and, as you say, E is the commonest letter that we have. It looks to me," he added slowly, "as if E must stand for E."

Over and over he studied the series of letters, comparing his results with a table he carried in his pocketbook, giving the relative frequency of various letters, combinations of letters and the most common short words such as "the" and "and" and others.

Patiently he studied it, using every method he could think of to unlock the mystery quickly. And yet, after perhaps half an hour's work with paper and pencil, covering sheets with figures that looked as if he were doing sums, he had arrived at the significance of only half a dozen letters, and that without any certainty, for it did not make the message read intelligibly even yet.

"Of course I can do it by the long scientific method, if I take the time," he remarked, pausing thoughtfully and somewhat vexed at the obstacles the thing afforded. "But in the meantime who knows what may be taking place?"

He was looking at the message first forward, as he had written it, then reversed. As he looked at it, he tapped absently on the edge of the desk with his pencil, more to relieve his impatience than for anything else.

Suddenly his pencil-tapping ceased. It seemed as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him.

Slowly he wrote out both versions of the message in the dots and dashes of the Morse alphabet.

Still, to me, it meant nothing. But Kennedy appeared to be at last highly elated. He ran his eye over what he had written again, then paused a moment, and began tapping on the table with his pencil.

"Here's the original message as we got it. Now I reverse it, tapping off its letters just as they come in Morse. Do you catch the idea? First they wrote the message out in ordinary words. Then that was translated into the dots and dashes of the Morse code. That in turn was reversed, and then that reversion was reduced to letters again."

"You know there are some letters that would come out in the cipher just as in the original, for in Morse they are just the same one way as the other—symmetrical. E is such a letter, so is I and O and a lot of others. But there are just enough which, when reversed, make some other letter to make such a cipher most difficult. For instance, take A, which is a dot and dash. Reverse that and a dash and dot stand for N. Therefore, wherever you find an A in this cipher replace it by N, and vice versa. Oh, this is easy now," he gloated, as we watched him with both wonder and satisfaction at the ease with which he had finally solved it.

They had sent the message backward in Morse. Kennedy did not bother to translate it further. He seized his pencil and with it quickly clicked off the letters, taking the message backward, in reverse order, and Sinclair wrote down the new, translated letters as he called them off.

It was the work of scarcely more than a minute and we had the original message which some one had gone to so much trouble to conceal in the transmission. It read:

SINCLAIR'S AEROPLANE DESTROYED SOMEHOW TODAY. HAVE YOU LOCATED MORELOS YET? SECRET SERVICE AGENTS HERE. CAN YOU GET US AWAY QUIETLY TONIGHT? SANCHEZ.

Kennedy looked at the message with puckered face a long time. I do not think he himself could quite figure out what it meant at first.

"Evidently, then, Sanchez does not know what caused the disaster to my aeroplane," he remarked simply.

"No," replied Kennedy. "That puzzles me. Yet it is possible that many things may be going on, almost under his eyes, and he might not realize their importance. What puzzles me is that, although he did not know the cause of the disaster, he seems to know about that message I sent to New York for my apparatus to have found out who we are and something of why we are here."

KENNEDY had returned to his radio-detective and was hastily running it on again. He had passed several perfectly intelligible messages that had been caught and recorded, but were of no value to us, when he paused again.

"There's what I was looking for," he cried, "the cipher again. It must be the reply. By George, it comes from across the Sound, from Bridgeport, as nearly as I can make it."

He ran the thing over slowly and copied down another message, reversed it, and translated through the Morse.

"It is signed Alvarez," he answered excitedly. "They must have separated. Evidently Alvarez has been on the trail of Morelos since Burke seized the arms. His message is:

"HAVE DISCOVERED MORELOS IN BRIDGEPORT. HE HAS NOT THE PLANS AND KNOWS NOTHING OF THEM. WILL CROSS SOUND IN POWER-BOAT IMMEDIATELY AND GET YOU. ALVAREZ."

"I should say so," rejoined Sinclair. "As nearly as I can make out, neither Sanchez or Ruiz here nor Alvarez knows anything about the disaster. And apparently neither does Morelos, the Revolutionist leader, know. Nobody seems to know."

"Still, that may not mean that they know nothing about the stolen plans," remarked Kennedy quietly, as he read over the message again. "Apparently they knew perfectly well that the plans had been stolen. It does not tell us which party stole them or who has them, it is true, but it does go a long step in clearing up the mystery. We don't know how Madame Valcour got them or who got them from her, but we are on the road at last to finding that out."

"You are right," he exclaimed, as he laid them down again. "Those people over at Seaville evidently fear us. The last train up to the city had gone when that message was sent, for there isn't very good service in that direction at night. They have called for help by wireless and Alvarez is coming to get them away in the best manner possible. That is the way I figure it out, at least."

Sinclair looked hastily at his watch, then out of the window at the Cimmerian darkness of the hundreds of square miles of water of the sheltered bays and harbors and the Sound beyond.

We both looked at Kennedy as he stood there calm and collected. The radio-detective had unmasked the plotters. But was it too late to catch them?

XII. — THE TRIPLE MIRROR

THE situation called for instant action. Yet what was there we could do, to all intents and purposes marooned down the bay from the Seaville House and the cottage? How in all that vast extent of blackness were we to discover anything?

Sinclair looked in amazement at Kennedy, calm and collected. I think for the moment he believed it was the calmness of despair.

"Couldn't we use the wireless in some way?" I asked desperately, without much idea of just how we might do it.

"Wireless—why, they would be just as likely to pick it up and know everything instantly then," he replied, hurrying from the library without explaining his remark, and making his way down to the dock where the Streamline lay.

Kennedy, however, was busily engaged over the peculiar apparatus which he lifted out of the hold of the little runabout. As far as I could make it out, it seemed to consist of nothing more than the peculiar prism of glass which he had exhibited to us before we left the Yacht Club. It was, as I have said, one of those black, inky nights with no moon—one of those nights when the myriad lights on the boats far down the harbor twinkled as mere points in the darkness, scarcely discernible at such a distance.

As we stood on the end of the dock Kennedy seemed to be engrossed in the study in black.

Here and there a moving light might be seen as a boat made its way up or down the bay, but there was no way of determining who or what they were, or whether or not their errands were legitimate. Hunting a needle in a haystack seemed to be mere child's play to locating the power-boat of Alvarez and those who sought to avoid us.

SUDDENLY from the darkness a long finger of light swept out into the night, plainly enough marked near the source, but diffused and disclosing nothing in the distance as it reached us.

I wondered what might be happening to Burke, whether he might not need us, or, if we tried to go to him, we might not overlook something of importance nearer where we now were.

"Yes," rejoined Kennedy, "Burke has trained the light down the bay in our direction."

Craig had leaped up on a railing and was capping and uncapping with the brass cover of the case the peculiar glass prism. I looked, uncomprehending, from him down at the wide path of light aimed at us, but apparently of no avail.

"Signaling with the triple mirror," he called back, still busy with the prism. "I thought we might have to use some means of communicating and I had this apparatus sent up here for the purpose. I hope Burke hasn't forgotten the code—it is simple enough."

I looked out again in the darkness, half expecting to see a ray of light, I suppose, emanating from us in the direction of Burke. Of course there was nothing.

Rapidly but deliberately Kennedy kept at work, which to us looked as futile as if he had tried to shout something over the distance with a megaphone.

Sinclair was more frankly sceptical than I, although he said nothing. He took a few steps toward the Streamline as if that were something tangible in which he could put faith.

"I'll be ready in a moment, Sinclair," shouted Kennedy. "Just wait till I get Burke started."

"What would have been the matter with using wireless?" he remarked more to me than to Craig.

"In this case the triple mirror is even better than wireless," he hastened, still working with it. "Besides, wireless requires heavy and complicated apparatus. This is portable, heatless, almost weightless —a source of light depending for its power on another source at a great distance."

I wondered how Burke could ever be expected to detect such a feeble ray as came from the triple mirror, but said nothing.

"Even from a rolling ship," continued Kennedy, alternately capping and uncapping the mirror, "the beam of light which this prism reflects always goes back, unerring, to its source. It would do so, Sinclair, from an aeroplane so high in the air that it could not be located."

Sinclair now for the first time seemed interested. He was scientist enough to appreciate that it was something new in the application of the laws of light that Kennedy was using.

"It is. The returning beam is invisible to any one not immediately in the path of the ray, and you can see what a slight chance there can be of some one being so situated. The ray always goes to the observer. It is simply a matter of pure mathematics, practically applied. The angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. You recall how no matter how you looked into the prism you saw your reflection accurately?"

"Yes, but when you are dealing in miles it must be a very different matter," persisted Sinclair.

Craig had finished flashing his quick message along the invisible beam of the searchlight.

"I told him simply that they were trying to avoid us and asked him to watch the roads away from the hotel and cottage. I said that we could take care of the bay, if he would show the lights."

Kennedy was peering through a little telescope which was attached to the case beside the triple mirror.

"Burke is signaling back to us!" he cried. "Good—he gets me perfectly—is going over to Seaville House—we can meet him there unless there is something for us to do elsewhere."

He was hastily packing up the apparatus which had served us so well in a tight pinch.

"Now, Sinclair," he added briskly, "this is the time when you can show us what your boat can do. If it isn't too late, we may be able to catch these people before they can slip out of our hands."

"I'm afraid I can't get the speed out of her at night that I got this afternoon," replied Sinclair cautiously. "It's risky enough trying to get up to a mile-a-minute speed in the daytime, but at night it's suicidal. I don't dare to let her out."

WE crowded into the Streamline as quickly as we could, Sinclair taking his place at the wheel, and cast off.

"Start slowly then," urged Craig. "It won't hurt. We shall have to take in just how things are at first, anyhow. You can cut loose in a moment."

Neither Sinclair nor I said anything, but I am sure both of us wondered how it was going to be safer to speed the boat up a few minutes later than now. Kennedy was eagerly looking up the harbor in the direction of the Yacht Club with an expectant air as if something might happen at any moment.

Cautiously at first Sinclair drove us along, gradually increasing the speed, but carefully devoting his entire attention to the running of the boat.

Suddenly there came a boom, as if from a gun, far away in the direction in which Kennedy was peering. Sinclair quickly shut off his motor and gazed about in surprise. Then came another from the same direction.

"What's that?" we both asked, startled. "There are the lights!" Kennedy exclaimed.

Another instant and from every quarter, up the bay toward which we were headed, showed what seemed to be huge balls of fire, literally rising from the sea, with a brilliantly luminous flame.

"A German invention," he replied, "for use at night against attacks from torpedo boats and aeroplanes."

"And they are using them against us?" I asked, forgetting in the excitement Kennedy's remark a short time before about the lights.

"No, no," he answered testily. "Don't you remember the mortar I set up at the club. From it Burke has shot half a dozen of these bombs."

"Phosphid of calcium," returned Kennedy briefly. "The mortar hurls them out far in every direction into the darkness. They are so constructed that they float after a short plunge into the water. The action of the salt water automatically ignites them merely by contact, and the chemical action of the phosphid and the water keeps them phosphorescing for several minutes."

Sinclair was as ready to praise as he had been to criticize a few minutes before.

"My hat off to you, Kennedy," he ejaculated. "You seem to have prepared for almost any emergency. It's splendid— splendid!"

I could quite agree with him. The sight which the calcium bombs unfolded about us was indeed a beautiful pyrotechnic display. They lighted up the shores and the high-lying hills about the bay in an almost spectral manner. Cottages hidden among the trees, or in coves here and there along the sweep of shore-line, seemed to stand out as if in an unearthly flare.

What the people about the shore must have thought I could only guess. Here and there we could see them crowding out on the porches and pointing in consternation at what appeared to be impossible bonfires in the very water itself.

Every craft in the harbor was shown as distinctly as if the glare of the sun shone on it, and the excitement on the boats was even greater than on the shore, for the people on them were closer and more amazed at what they saw.

Together we scanned the bay carefully for any sign of a boat moving suspiciously.

"There it is," cried Kennedy, bending forward nervously and pointing almost directly ahead of us.

We strained our eyes. Perhaps half a mile from the Seaville House we could distinguish a power-boat moving swiftly in and out among the craft at anchor, trying frantically to reach the open water.

Sinclair swung his helm just a trifle so as to cross their course as they came down toward us and crowded on all the speed his speedy hull could make. With the muffler cut out we awakened the echoes of the hills as if it had been an international race.

THEN followed as wild a dash across the harbor as I would care to take, day or night. The spray from the Streamline rose in a cloud, and the wind taking it drenched us. But Sinclair did not care. He had fallen into the spirit of the chase and, as now and then a wild shout was wafted to us from the shore, he knew that all eyes were on him and that Westport wanted to know what the famous little craft could do.

Kennedy had not reckoned without a knowledge of psychology. It was only an instant that the people in the power-boat might have doubted that they were our object. They saw us and they saw at the same time that there could be only a question of seconds when the Streamline would be up with them.

The phosphid bombs were holding out splendidly and, as the power-boat came between one of them and us, we could just distinguish the people in it, though at the distance it was impossible to recognize them, of course.

"There are five of them besides the man managing the boat," muttered Kennedy, "and one of them, at least, seems to be a woman."

"They're turning," interrupted Sinclair with just a touch of pride and satisfaction at the compliment they paid his boat.

The power-boat had turned as short as its pilot dared and was now retracing its course in the direction of the Seaville House. We had evidently caught them in the nick of time, for a few minutes longer and they would have been down the bay and perhaps out of reach of the phosphid glare that betrayed them.

Apparently their idea was to gain the pier of the hotel, where at least they would be on an equality with us, for their boat, whatever might be its cruising radius, was simply no match in speed for ours.

"He has Sinclair's car which we left at the club," replied Kennedy. "He ought to."

"Look over the shore-road," put in Sinclair. "You ought to be able to see if there is a car there."

Sure enough, where the road ran for some distance along the very edge of the bay, shaded by a few sparse locust trees, we could catch a glimpse of a car tearing along at a breakneck speed, its siren horn warning others at the curves in the road and adding one more feature to the excitement.

Would Burke be able to get there? Could he do the distance in time? The Seaville House was not far from the club, but at one point the road bent back, away from the bay, and we now no longer could distinguish Burke.

Sinclair was speeding the runabout to the limit, even here where the shipping was thick. On either side of us I could see the boats at anchor rocking wildly from the waves that we plowed up in huge furrows.

They had reached the dock of the hotel, and we could see them pile out and run up it. It was only a moment later when Sinclair shut off his power and with a daring flourish, regardless of the varnish of the Streamline, brought us to the opposite side of the float.

Kennedy sprang ashore ahead of us and sprinted up the dock, through an excited crowd that had gathered to witness an event that they did not understand yet could fully enjoy.

The bystanders pointed up the hill beside the hotel, as if that were quicker than words.

Panting, puffing, perspiring, we followed the directions, Kennedy several yards ahead of us.

As we turned the corner of the roadway, we came upon the hotel garage, deserted by the employees in the excitement on the bay. One of them came running toward us.

"Six of them—they stole a car—I saw 'em from the hotel-porch—couldn't get here quick enough!" he blurted out.

Another moment and the curious crowd had surrounded us, all talking at once, each one with a different plan.

XIII. — THE WIRELESS WIRE-TAPPER

A MOMENT later Burke came dashing around the curve in the road in Sinclair's car and the crowd scattered to let him pass. On the front seat with him was Mrs. Hawley.

It had been a close race and Burke had done his best, for it had been necessary for him to remain at the club to fire the mortar with the calcium bombs. Without them the power-boat might have slipped away unobserved, but the time taken in getting off had been just a minute too much.

A hasty parley followed and as many cars as could be pressed into service were started out along the possible routes that the fugitives had taken, while Kennedy and Burke sought the telegraph operator at the hotel to spread an alarm as quickly as they could to the neighboring villages through which they might pass.

Sinclair and Mrs. Hawley were engaged in earnest conversation when Craig and Burke returned. She was telling him of the dash they had made from the club, and how she had insisted on accompanying Burke.

It was evident that, whatever might be said of the Mexican acquaintances of Sinclair, Mrs. Hawley had justified Kennedy's judgment of her and had proved faithful.

Craig had thrown off all disguise now, at least before her, and was questioning her frankly about the character and habits of the people in the cottage, whom we had met once at the cabaret. I think even Hattie Hawley was surprised at her own ignorance of the intimate life of her acquaintances, before Kennedy had gone very far. She had known them on the surface pretty well, but with characteristic secretiveness they had succeeded in completely concealing for instance, their domestic arrangements, both in the city and at Seaville.

On other visits to Seaville they had spent much of their time at the hotel, especially on the occasion when Madame Valcour had been there and Sinclair had gone out of his way to entertain the fascinating adventuress. But this time they had evidently come prepared to live more quietly, for they had brought along two Japanese whom she had seen now and then at the Mexican cabaret.

When it was all sifted down, it was practically only at the cabaret and in their dignified mescal debauches that Mrs. Hawley knew them. I think Sinclair was rather pleased than otherwise at it, for he saw that she had been in reality working more to protect their mutual interests in southern Mexico than for any other reason. However, that did not do us much good just at present.

"While we're waiting for some report," cut in Kennedy bruskly, after Mrs. Hawley had told what little she could of the story, "suppose we go up the hill and take a look at the cottage."

He had already started ahead, Burke and I following and Sinclair and Mrs. Hawley bringing up the rear.

We stood for a few moments in the shadow of a hedge while Craig sent Burke, as an expert in that sort of thing, scouting about the house to make sure that it was deserted. Burke quickly returned from the shadow of a barn which had been remade into a garage.

"Then let's take a chance," decided Craig, who had employed the time in gazing at the wireless mast that was fixed on one of the gables and had interested him the first time he saw the house.

We advanced to the door and, as a precaution, rang the bell while Burke hastily ascertained that the windows were locked also. No one answered, and together we forced the door and burst into the silent and dark house.

IT was scantily furnished after the manner of most Summer cottages, but it was not the furniture that interested Craig.

"I've been wondering about that wireless business," he remarked, leading us from room to room.

He paused with an exclamation as he came to a room on the first floor in an extension on the side of the house which gave a view of the bay.

On a mission table before the window were all the paraphernalia of a wireless telegraph outfit. Quickly Kennedy ran his eye over it as he picked up piece after piece. He seemed to be more than usually interested.

"This is a curious type," I heard him mutter to himself. "It's not exactly like any other that I've seen."

We gathered about him, none of us knowing much about it, except possibly Sinclair who for the time being seemed to be more interested in the study of Mrs. Hawley than in wireless.

"Spark-gap of the quenched type," remarked Kennedy jerkily, noting one thing after another. "Break system relay—the operator could overhear any interference while he was transmitting. You make the transformation by a single throw of a six-point switch which times the oscillating and open currents to resonance. That's it—it can be easily changed from one wave length to another."

"They always seemed to know more about you than I did," we overheard Mrs. Hawley saying to Sinclair. "I don't know —but I used to think you were pretty intimate with them."

"Only in the same way that I tried to keep on as good terms as I could with the Revolutionists," he replied with a laugh. "There was no telling which side would come out on top in the end. But how they managed to know so—"

"Easy enough," cut in Craig who had overheard, too. "Look at this wireless wiretapping. It beats even the one I improvised. Why, Sinclair, you couldn't receive or send a message through the Seaville Station that they couldn't overhear. They knew every time you sent out your aeroplane for a trial—could 'feel' it, as it were, through this apparatus."

Sinclair bent over it and at once recognized the cleverness with which it had been devised.

"It needed only that they were listening in to read that message I sent to my laboratory in New York," Craig continued. "I half suspected something of the kind and thought I'd give them a chance—but they have been too clever for us—at least in the first round."

Sinclair was speechless with amazement, While Madame Valcour had been monopolizing his time, some one here had been at work in another direction spying on him, perhaps waiting the most favorable opportunity for using the burglar's microphone to enter his safe and rob him of the perfected plans of the airship.

I tried vainly to piece the scattered events together. Supposing it had been Sanchez, using Valcour, who had stolen the plans and then had entrusted them to Valcour for safe-keeping. Who had got them from Valcour and how? Had it been Morelos? Kennedy's radio-detective had reported that Alvarez had said Morelos knew nothing of them. I was forced to give it up. We were getting warmer in the search it was true, but as yet there seemed to be more heat than light.

Sinclair, too, appeared to be considering the same problem and with no greater success than I had.

"That's wonderful," he remarked glancing over the clever wireless-outfit before us. "But I can't understand yet about that accident to the aeroplane. Do you imagine these people knew anything about that?"

"I've been wondering that myself," commented Kennedy. "Suppose we hunt through the house a little farther. There seems to be nothing to prevent us."

We followed Kennedy as he went slowly up the stairs, looking from right to left in every room as we went. There was nothing out of the ordinary on the second floor and we mounted on up to the attic where there seemed to be two finished rooms.

Kennedy groped about in the darkness of one room in which was the dormer window of the gable, knocked something down, and finally found the light, switching it on.

"Ah!" he exclaimed as he looked about at a peculiar apparatus filling the room, "I suspected some wireless-power trick. Here it is."

IT was a most unusual collection of coils of wires and other paraphernalia of which I had never seen the like before.

Kennedy turned a switch. A curious crackling, snapping noise issued from the machine. In it we saw a sheet of flame several feet long, a veritable artificial bolt of lightning. The rest of us shrank back in momentary fear at the apparently gigantic forces of nature which seemed let loose in the room.

"Don't be afraid," called Kennedy. "I've seen all this before. It won't hurt you. It's an application of a high-frequency current."

Whatever it was I could not overcome the awe which it inspired in me. I wondered how the arch-fiend had restrained himself from turning the deadly power on us.

Kennedy continued to experiment gingerly with the apparatus, and finally shut it off.

"That's all very well," persisted Sinclair, who had been watching carefully, "but I don't understand it yet."

"Don't you see?" urged Kennedy, looking at the machine with an air of great admiration. "What this fellow has really done is to use a high-frequency current—to appropriate simply the invention of Nikola Tesla."

We were trying to follow him, and Sinclair nodded acquiescence, comprehending only vaguely.

"Tesla's theory," explained Kennedy, continuing to explore the dormer-window room, "is that under certain conditions the atmosphere, which is normally a high insulator, assumes conducting properties and so becomes capable of conveying any amount of electrical energy.

"I myself have seen electrical oscillations such as those which you saw just now of such intensity that while they could be circulated with impunity through one's arms and chest, they could be made to melt wires farther along in the circuit. Yet the person through whom such a current was passing at the time actually felt no inconvenience."

Kennedy was holding us spellbound by this new wonder of science as he elaborated it.

"I have seen a loop of heavy copper wire," he continued, "energized by such oscillations and a mass of metal within the loop heated to the fusing point, and yet into the space in which this destructive aerial turmoil was going on I have seen men thrust their hands and even their heads without feeling anything or experiencing any injurious after-effect. In this form all the energy of all the dynamos at Niagara could pass through one's body and yet produce no injury. But, diabolically directed, this vast energy has been used to melt the wires in the little dynamo that runs the gyroscope of the aeroplane. That was the cause of the disaster."

We stood amazed at the ingenuity of it and not a little in awe of the hand and brain that could conceive and wield such an engine of destruction so certainly for their own ends.

"Operated it all?" he repeated. "As a matter of fact, they seem to me to be entirely distinct systems, although the operator of this system of projecting wireless-power must have used at least a part of the outside apparatus of the wireless wiretapper for the transmission of his destructive current."

"It's the operator at the Seaville House," explained Sinclair, leaving the room hurriedly, followed by Kennedy and the rest of us.

"The car has been seen along the Sound road—they are evidently heading for the city."

"I'm afraid not," answered Sinclair slowly. "You see, it is so late that we can't possibly get any of the constables in the towns, and as for the city, there are scores of routes they can take to enter it, if indeed they attempt it by means of the car at all. No, I'm afraid that is hopeless, now."

Kennedy had taken a last look about the cottage. They had evidently prepared for flight and everything else that could be taken or destroyed had been removed.

"We're wasting time here, then," he concluded. "The best we can do is to follow them to the city and search for them there."

"I know it," returned Kennedy. "I wasn't thinking of trains. We'll have to make it in Sinclair's car. We can't wait until morning."

Mrs. Hawley insisted on accompanying us, and a few minutes later Kennedy, Sinclair, Burke, Mrs. Hawley and myself were threading our way along the roads leading to New York, making pretty good time in spite of the difficult driving at night.

It was far past midnight when we arrived over the uptown bridge in New York, and arriving there, the question was where to go.

"Why not the cabaret?" suggested Mrs. Hawley. "That was their headquarters. They would not stay there, I suppose, but they might stop there."

THE streets were deserted, and it was only a matter of minutes we pulled up as quietly as we could before the place which, of course, to all outward appearance was closed.

A tap on the door brought no response from the lookout, although that was to be expected. Craig and Burke did not wait longer than to tap, but with the aid of a lever from the car succeeded in forcing the door and entering cautiously, prepared for a surprise.

The place was as still as if it had been deserted. If there had been any one there when we arrived they must have made their escape, perhaps over the roofs.

As we entered the private dining-room in which we had once attended the strange mescal party, Kennedy turned the switch and flooded the place with light.

There lay the beautiful Señora Ruiz, tall, almost imperial in her beautiful gown.

He bent over and tried to lift her up. As he did so, a gold bracelet, unclasped, clattered to the floor.

He picked it up and glanced hurriedly at it. It was hollow. But in that part where it unclasped could be seen a minute hypodermic needle and traces of a brownish liquid.

"A poison-bracelet," he muttered to himself, looking from it to a long scratch on the fair arm of the Señora. "One in which poison could be hidden so that in an emergency death could cheat the law."

She was still breathing, but her convulsed face showed that even Kennedy's hasty restoratives had no effect.

"The others!" exclaimed Burke who stood behind us, looking from the deadly bracelet to the insensible beauty, and slowly comprehending what it all might mean. "The others—she alone knows where and who they are!"

Mrs. Hawley had taken the head of her former friend in her lap and was smoothing it gently, as she looked mutely at Kennedy.

What was to be done? Were the real criminals to escape because we had caught only an accomplice, and she had either chosen or been forced to choose the easiest way of escape?

XIV. — THE ARTIFICIAL KIDNEY

"CALL up Dr. Leslie right away, Walter," cried Kennedy making a quick decision, "then hurry down to the car. I am going to the laboratory."

Señora Ruiz had been lifted to a couch and the rest remained at the Mexican cabaret while Craig and I made a quick dash to the laboratory. Not a moment was wasted. He jumped from the car almost before it had stopped and went directly to a cupboard in which was locked a large oblong case.

We were back again, almost before they fairly expected us. Señora Ruiz was still alive though breathing with difficulty.

Without an instant's delay he had his coat off and was opening the case. We watched helplessly as he took from it a peculiar arrangement and laid it carefully on the table. It seemed to consist of innumerable little tubes, each about sixteen inches long, with S-turns that made it look like a miniature glass radiator.

"There is just one chance," he said, working feverishly. "I wish Leslie would come —I need him."

Altogether the apparatus could not have been much over a cubic foot in size, and it was enclosed in a glass cylinder through which we could see a hundred feet or more of the tubes, a perfectly closed tubular system.

"I have kept this absolutely sterile in a germicidal solution," he went on, scrubbing away at his hands and nails now with an antiseptic solution. "Inside those tubes and surrounding them is a saline solution which is kept at a uniform temperature by means of a special heating-apparatus."

The table had been drawn up alongside the couch and on it was placed the apparatus beside the unconscious Señora.

A noise outside announced the arrival of the coroner and a moment later he hurried into the room.

"What's the matter?" he asked breathlessly, endeavoring to take in the situation but not understanding it.

"Just in time, Doctor," exclaimed Kennedy visibly relieved at the presence of a medical man. "I need you."

Briefly and in a low tone which we could not catch he proceeded to tell Leslie just enough of what had happened and what he proposed to attempt so that they could go ahead.

"Perhaps a little anesthetic—just enough to insure keeping her under—would make it easier," commented Leslie reaching into his case for the paraphernalia.

He, too, seemed possessed by a germicidal mania, and after the quick but thorough ablution, gently administered just enough of a narcotic to stop the convulsive movements which might have interfered with their work.

We stood, scarcely speaking a word, in the far corner of the room while Kennedy and Leslie wasted no time. First they attached the end of one of the tubes, by means of a little silver ring or cannula to the carotid artery, and then a tube from the other end of the apparatus to the jugular vein in the Señora's neck.

"Is it all right?" asked Leslie of Kennedy when he had finished the surgical work.

"Yes," answered Craig with a thorough glance over what had been done, "yes—you can release it."

As Dr. Leslie released the clamp which held the artery just above where it had been severed, the still wildly beating heart of Señora Ruiz seemed to spurt the arterial blood from the carotid into the tubes which held the normal salt solution now at blood heat.

It was astounding to see the human body working almost with the same precision as a machine. That arterial pressure, in turn, pumped the salt solution which filled the tubes, into the jugular vein. It required no more than the exercise of common sense to see that that was necessary, replacing the arterial blood that had been poured into the tubes from the other end, and thus maintaining the normal hydrostatic conditions in the body-circulation.

We stood rooted to the spot by the marvel of the thing. She was actually being kept alive although perhaps a third of her blood was outside of her body.

Our own interest could not, however, rival that of Kennedy and Leslie who, in the professional excitement of trying to save a lost life, were oblivious for the time to everything except their work and their patient. They were giving their undivided attention to the success of the operation, and it was only after some minutes of anxious observation that they even seemed to notice that the rest of the world existed.

SINCLAIR was the first to speak, for the rest of us were simply speechless with wonder. Kennedy and Leslie had at last straightened up and were regarding the automatic working of the machine before them with undisguised satisfaction.

"What I have here," returned Kennedy slowly, not taking his eyes for a second off the thing, "is in reality an artificial kidney."

Burke looked at me, incredulity written all over his face, as if it was blasphemous even to try to improve on the organs that nature had given us. Incredible as it seemed, we could not but believe, for there was the apparatus before us working, apparently, as smoothly as a watch.

"It is a system devised recently by several very noted doctors at Johns Hopkins," corroborated Leslie in a manner which showed that as a physician he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing the thing for thousands of dollars.

"Yes," continued Kennedy, "when there is a toxin or poison in the blood, the kidneys naturally endeavor to eliminate it. But often, as in this case, an emergency arises and it is eliminated too slowly. Then this arrangement is intended to aid nature in a work she never designed the human kidney to do."

"What do you call it?" prompted Sinclair who, although not a medical man, was a scientist and felt the keen spirit of pioneering which all true scientists have.

"We call it vividiffusion," answered Craig. "Fundamentally it depends for its action on the physical principle of osmosis. You know that if substances of a certain kind are placed in solution next to each other and separated only by a porous membrane, there will take place and interchange of the molecules or ions of the one substance with those of the other until the two liquids are completely mixed. It is an important property—without it life such as we know it would be impossible. These tubes, which perhaps you have thought were made of glass, are really made of a porous substance known as celloidin."

"Then you mean to say that the poison in her blood," I exclaimed, "is passing slowly through those celloidin walls into that salt solution which surrounds the tubes?"

"Precisely," he returned. "Any substance, any poison that is dialyzable is diffused into the surrounding salt solution and the blood is passed back into the body, with no air in it, no infection, no further alteration. And as it is done while the person is still living, we call it, as I told you, vividiffusion—a sort of living osmosis, after the manner that it goes on normally in the body itself."

Dr. Leslie himself, although he had heard of it, did not seem to be entirely clear on the matter.

"That has been provided against. Clotting is prevented by the injection of a harmless substance known as hirudin—something derived from leeches."

"Yes," put in Sinclair who had been revolving the thing in his mind, "but won't that dialyze out other substances besides those you want to remove?"

"I prevent the loss of anything in the blood which I want retained," explained Kennedy, "by placing in the salt solution first, around the outside of the tubes, an amount of that substance equal to that held in solution by the blood. In that way, you see, we keep the blood and salt solution in balance, as it were, and nothing happens in regard to such substances."

"And of course," cut in Leslie, "all substances in the blood are not capable of diffusion, you know."

"Oh, of course," agreed Kennedy. "The colloidal substances, for instance, would not pass out by osmosis anyhow. It is only the crystallizable elements which are capable of diffusion. And it is precisely those elements that we want to reach. Yet by these delicate adjustments doctors can remove and discover any desired substance in the blood that is capable of elimination at all, in such a way."

"I see," agreed Sinclair. "It does in a way just the work that the kidneys do in elimination."

"In fact this little apparatus, with its one hundred and ninety-two tubes," he added, "has been found in practice to compare favorably with the kidneys themselves in removing even a deadly dose of poison. That was why I thought of it instantly in this case."

"I hope she lives," she breathed fervently. "Whatever her faults, I always rather liked the Senora."

"Yes," put in Sinclair, "there have been tragedies enough in this unfortunate affair."

"They are a violent people," he remarked. "They don't seem to value human life any more than if they were so many head of cattle."

As for me, I was unable to take my mind off the process that was going on before us. Kennedy was actually cleaning the blood of the gay little dancer and then putting it back again—getting rid of an elusive, subtle, fatal poison. I recalled his previous work in tracing out the poison and how it had been interrupted and wondered whether now we should be any closer in fixing it definitely upon some one.

"The fact is," he replied, "this process can be kept up for several hours without injury, if we are as careful as we have been so far. But I don't think that will be necessary in this case after we have relieved the unusual strain that has been put on the vital organs."

"Stopping the process, I suppose, is as ticklish as starting it," Sinclair remarked.

"Yes," replied Kennedy. "I'm glad you spoke of that. If anything should call me away suddenly, I think I can trust Dr. Leslie with that just as well, perhaps better, than myself. You see, Doctor, finally, at the close of the operation, serious loss of blood is overcome by driving back the greater part of it into the body, including of course, now, much of the salt solution. The artery and vein are closed up, of course, and the patient is carefully treated so that she will make a quick recovery. There is usually no difficulty on that score."

Minute after minute we watched the fascinating process of seeing the life-blood coursing through the porous tubes immersed in the salt solution, while Kennedy gave his undivided attention to the success of the delicate operation.

It was, however, after all a tedious process, and as it became more and more automatic and allowed of relaxing attention just a little, Kennedy's active mind resumed the consideration of other features of the case.

"I've just been thinking," remarked Kennedy, coming over to us, "that if we are to clear this thing up, there is no use in our all standing here doing nothing. Burke, your secret-service men must have had lines out about Morelos. According to the last report we had, he was in Bridgeport. He certainly did not cross the Sound in the powerboat, and if he knew that we were out at Westport he would never think that we had returned to New York so soon. I should think that some of your men might find a trace of him. The chances are ten to one that he has returned to the city, at least for a flying visit."

"I'll do the best I can," he said. "Perhaps they have been able to get something out of the men we captured the other night. But how about Alvarez and Sanchez?"

"I think she can tell us about them, if we can pull her through," he replied. "While you are trying to run down Morelos, I wish Jameson would get in touch with Police Headquarters. We may as well have all the railroads, ferries and steamships watched, although I can't say how much good it will do."

Burke left and I hastened to get Police Headquarters on the wire and have a general alarm sent out for the two missing representatives of the Mexican Federals.

A minute search of the cabaret from roof to cellar, with the aid of Sinclair, failed to elicit any further evidence. There was not a soul there. Either the place had been deserted, except for Señora Ruiz, when we entered or the others had succeeded in fleeing.

We returned to the private dining-room where Kennedy and Leslie were still at work. Mrs. Hawley, showing the effects of the strain of the night, was sticking bravely to her post.

"I think you had better let me drive you in the car around to a hotel," suggested Sinclair finally. "You look tired out. The Vanderveer is only just around the corner."

The mere mention of the name of the hotel seemed to arouse something in Mrs. Hawley. She looked up quickly and I knew that it had suggested to her the strange death of Valcour.

"Oh," hastened Sinclair, noticing it also, "any place will do. You ought not to wear yourself out."

"I think I shouldn't be able to rest much anyway yet," she murmured, looking up at him. "Please let me stay. I'm just as anxious to know how it turns out as the rest of you."

There was something in her voice that arrested my attention. Sinclair had seen it already. His remark had started again a train of thought about Valcour and the attentions he had paid the adventuress both at the Seaville House and the Vanderveer.

"I can't blame you," he remarked pointedly. "My interest in the case is exactly the same as yours. One can't see two— three—acquaintances—struck down as we have and not wish to have justice done."

She looked up quickly at the word "acquaintances," caught his eye, then glanced away again at the Señora across the room. It was not imagination, but I felt that she did not look so tired after that. I moved nearer Kennedy and Leslie, but in the stillness of the room I heard nothing further from them.

And thus the minutes lengthened into hours as the blood of the poisoned Señora Ruiz coursed through its artificial channels, literally being washed free of the toxin.

Would it succeed? Would vividiffusion bring back the unfortunate woman, even long enough for her to yield her secret and enable us to catch the real criminal? What if she died?

XV. — THE ARROW POISON

"HAVE you any idea what the poison is?" asked Dr. Leslie at length, voicing the thought which had been in my own mind.

"What is it?" asked Sinclair. "Some strange South American poison like curare, or is it one of those Mexican poisons that I have heard of, the mariguana weed or the toluache?"

Then as he saw the look of curiosity on all our faces, he went on deliberately—

"I suppose this is as good a time as any in which to tell of what I have discovered and what I expect to discover."

We pressed forward as he began to speak, hanging on his words and for the moment forgetful of the wretched woman on the couch, for whom science was fighting valiantly to clear up the mystery.

Kennedy reached into the pocket of his coat on a chair and drew forth the little reed-stick, with the buff-brown cylinder on the end. Simple though it was, it seemed now endowed with an awful power. He laid it on the table before us, our eyes riveted on it.

"That," he began solemnly, "is a little article which I picked up under the window of the extension in which Professor Neumeyer had his study and private museum. Mr. Sinclair will remember the occasion. It was while he was searching through the collection to discover whether anything was missing."

Kennedy was evidently calculating his psychology well. It was a weird hour, fast approaching the gray of dawn; the surroundings were such as to inspire fear. In my mind's eye I could see distinctly the picture that he conjured up—the terribly contorted face of the old archeologist, the uncanny idol squatting on the desk before him, the curious collection of the lore of ancient and almost forgotten races about him.

"What was missing, Sinclair?" shot out Kennedy, then, before Sinclair could answer he added quickly—"It was the so-called Pillar of Death—the porphyry block that told the secret of the buried Mixtec treasure, the block about which there had clustered innumerable superstitions."

"Never mind," pursued Kennedy evenly, "but I did know it, and others, many others, knew it. On the back of his neck I found a round red mark. It was the same as the mark I found on the arm of Valcour when first I saw her dead, alone, in her room at the Vanderveer."

The other picture flashed over me, of the proud adventuress, perhaps feeling the poison circulating through her veins, seeking to gain her room, only there to die. Where had she been? How had the poison been given her? And why?

"Some one," continued Craig, "has used the same poison twice—once to secure a secret which would make him, would make his government invincible, invulnerable, and again to secure for himself a fortune which would make of him a modern Croesus. It was a high stake, worth playing for in his estimation, by every means, fair and foul— even the foulest and most barbaric."

Dr. Leslie had so far succeeded in shaking loose his attention from Kennedy as to lean over and touch the buff-brown cylinder with his finger.

"The barbaric means to his end which he chose," replied Kennedy impressively. "That little cylinder is a piece of annonoki, or bushi."

We stared at him blankly, having only a faint inkling of what it was. The mere words had in them something that showed us that this was no usual case. Who had used it, how he had obtained it, none of us asked, but allowed Craig to proceed now in his own way in explaining the mystery as far as he was able.

"Now," he resumed, looking at Dr. Leslie more than at the rest of us, "in the case of aconite poisoning, not only is the lethal dose very small but, as you know, our chemical methods of detection are almost valueless, if not quite so.

"The dose of the active principle, aconitin nitrate, is about one six-hundredth of a grain. There are no color tests, no reaction as in the case of many other organic poisons. It is no wonder that Dr. Leslie's men were unable to determine what the nature of the poison was in either the case of Valcour or later in the case of Neumeyer."

I WONDERED what he was driving at. Was there indeed no way, short of the actual fact of sudden death, to prove that they had died of poisoning, no test, no manner in which the poisonings could be fixed on some one? Had the murderer used the safest of poisons?

"Then it will be impossible to connect any one with these murders, I'm afraid," broke in Dr. Leslie, repeating what he had already said before in the laboratory. "You have admitted yourself that there is no test for aconitin, once it gets into the system. You couldn't even prove that it was some form of aconite that killed them."

We were all looking at Kennedy whose self-possession was unruffled. The bare possibility that the murderer might escape by some technicality was appalling.

"I suppose you never dreamed that starch granules might afford a method of tracing out the nature of a poison quite the equal of the blood-crystal tests by which we can now tell both the species of the animal from which blood comes and even the various races among men, perhaps soon the very individual from which certain drops of blood came."

"No," replied Dr. Leslie, "I have always considered that all starch was alike, in fact." Kennedy smiled.

"Far from it," he went on. "Recently Dr. Edward Reichert of the University of Pennsylvania has discovered a new starch test, a means of detecting the nature of a poison in obscure cases in criminology, and especially in cases where the quantity of poison necessary to cause death is so minute that no trace of it can be found in the blood after a very short interval."

Kennedy was reveling now in what I call his minutiae of crime, one of those almost ultra-microscopic methods of getting at the facts of a case and securing evidence where it seemed impossible.

"To me at least," he pursued, "the so-called 'starch method' is a novel and extremely inviting subject. Thus, according to modern research, the peculiarities of the starch granules of any plant are quite as distinctive of the plant as are the peculiarities of the hemoglobin crystals of the blood of an animal."

"When such a poison as aconite," pursued Craig, "is introduced subcutaneously, either by a needle-thrust delivered when a victim is partly under the influence of some other drug or drink, or when the victim is taken by surprise and off guard, the lethal constituents are rapidly absorbed. Formerly a murderer might have depended on that to defy detection. But not now. The starch from the poison remains in the wound. It can be recovered and studied microscopically.

"You will recall that I squeezed out drops of fluid from the little punctures both in Valcour's arm and Neumeyer's neck. Those glass slides contained starch granules which I have studied carefully under the microscope. Such granules can be recognized definitely, and I have recognized them. Dr. Reichert has made and published a minute study of twelve hundred starches from all sorts of plants and I have taken advantage of the immense amount of labor which he has done. For hours I studied and compared the granules. Dr. Leslie, in spite of what you have learned from the text-books, this poison was aconite —the active principle of which is the terribly deadly drug aconitin."

No one spoke as Kennedy, his face working with the energy he put into his exposition of the point, carried it through to its conclusion.

"More than that," he proceeded triumphantly, "it not only proves to have been aconitin which was used as the poisonous agent in these cases, but I am prepared to go even further and to assert that I have been able to recognize the particular variety of starch granules themselves." He was pointing his long, slender forefinger directly at the buff-brown cylinder which we had forgotten for the moment. "The poison came from that identical piece of arrow-poison, or as I called it, annonoki."

It was a startling conclusion. In spite of our weariness he had us all keyed up now, as step after step he led us along irresistibly the road to the conclusion which he himself had reached regarding the poison.

"Just what is this annonoki?" inquired Dr. Leslie to whom, as to the rest of us, the name had a strange and romantic sound.

"I am prepared to say positively that it is annonoki—aconite," he said at length. "I can even say something, as I have already done, of the method by which it was probably administered. But as to the place and the person or persons—" he paused and looked meaningly at Señora Ruiz, whom for the moment the rest of us had forgotten—"as to those questions we must wait until these lips open to solve the problem.

"But as for annonoki itself, it is well-known to many persons. Any one who has traveled has heard of arrow-poisons. Indeed that was one of the first things Mr. Sinclair thought about a few moments ago. Annonoki is an Aino arrow-poison."

Of a sudden there flashed over me the recollection of the peculiar, outlandish servant of Nichi Moto, Otaka, the Aino. True, there did not seem to be anything especially offensive about him, but I was about to pronounce his name, at least to test Kennedy by the expression of his face, when Sinclair interrupted.

"Alvarez was always a great friend of the Japanese who rule the Ainos, a great student in their customs," he cried. "I have heard much about his friendship for the race."

Kennedy said nothing, but I knew that he was thinking of the letter which we had taken from the little office out in the hall one night and read by the X-rays. In it Alvarez had been pictured as the friend of the Japanese, perhaps seeking a more cordial relationship between the Mexican and the Jap on the basis of their common origin.

"Yes," put in Mrs. Hawley, "Alvarez was always intimately concerned with anything Japanese. I have heard him talk of them and with them. It was only when he came to Westport that the Señora and Sanchez brought out the two Japanese—you remember."

Kennedy was listening carefully to what they said, to see whether it added anything to the testimony of the letter which we had already read about the activities of Alvarez.

"I may as well finish up what I have to say of the arrow-poison," he remarked at length. "Like so many barbarians, the Ainos from time immemorial have prepared virulent poisons with which they charged their weapons of the chase and warfare."

He tossed down on the table the short arrow which we had picked up in the curio-shop the day of our visit.

"There is one of their arrows," he added, "a crude, almost useless, clumsy affair. Merely to confirm what I had heard of their poison, I studied its tip, along that deep blood groove. The current information about such arrows is correct. Formerly the formula for the preparation of the poison, as in the case of most of the arrow-poisons of other tribes, such as curare, were known only to certain members and the secret was passed down from generation to generation as an heirloom, as it were. But those who have studied the thing now tell us that it has been proved that the active principle of this annonoki is the well-known aconite."

"It was a lucky chance, Kennedy," exclaimed a familiar voice in the doorway. "My men had already taken him into custody as he stepped off the train in the Grand Central early tonight. Here he is."

WE turned in surprise, to see Burke leading along our friend whom we had seen in the back-room of the greasy South Street saloon on the night when he had sought the gun-runners. It was Morelos, his crisp, curly hair rumpled as if he had not slept for days, but with the same piercing, defiant look about the eyes and cruel mouth.

"He's the toughest customer I've had in a long time," growled Burke. "I can't get a word out of him."

Morelos gazed about in silence. I verily believe that if Kennedy had ordered him shot the next moment he would have gone to his doom in the same defiant manner. His eye fell for the moment on the form of Señora Ruiz. He did not, of course, understand what it all meant. Yet for the moment there was just the flicker of a smile that played over his features at the sight of one of the hated Federals brought low, for whatever reason.

"Morelos," shot out Kennedy, without waiting a moment for the first surprise to wear off, "I have discovered what it was that caused the death of Madame Valcour."

Kennedy had thrust him at the only vulnerable spot. Instinctively the man's muscles tightened, he clenched his fists, two bright spots of passion blazed in his sallow cheeks, and he had to bite his lips to restrain the exclamation that nearly escaped him.

Even though he had not said a word, there was in his actions sufficient confirmation of the letters from the murdered adventuress which we had found in the hidden files of the South Street Junta.

Burke twisted his arm, to remind him that violence here was impossible. Morelos did not even wince. There was savage enough in him to force a contemptuous smile at the pain.

"Walter," said Kennedy quietly, more for its moral effect on Morelos than through any hope that he would get any information, "call up the police and see what the latest is about Sanchez and Alvarez since they left Bridgeport after they had traced Morelos there."

Morelos had evidently had some experience with the "third degree," for, beyond a momentary flash of the eye at the words which showed the extent of Kennedy's knowledge of his movements, he was to be betrayed into nothing more incriminating.

There was, of course, nothing to report as I left the telephone downstairs, and I was trying to frame up something that might further shake Morelos, if that were possible.

As I entered the room, however, Morelos for the moment seemed forgotten. All except Burke were bending over Senora Ruiz.

XVI. — THE STOLEN SECRET

SEÑORA RUIZ had moved! A low exclamation from Kennedy had attracted the attention of those in the room.

The operation of the vividiffusion apparatus had been stopped, and deftly, working on his mettle as a surgeon, Dr. Leslie was joining up the several arteries and veins, as Kennedy prepared to stimulate the returning consciousness.

Scarcely the sound of a breath now disturbed the tense silence of the room as we watched the efforts to bring the unfortunate little dancer out from the effects of the stupor, now that the poison had been removed.

"Please—please—stand back," implored Kennedy. "She needs all the quiet and oxygen she can get!"

Evidently she heard dimly, was straining every effort to grasp the fleeting consciousness that had once slipped beyond her.

Kennedy leaned over and adjusted the pillows. There was just a flutter of her eyelids, as if she could feel and appreciate that some one was trying to do something for her.

"The bracelet," he whispered into her ear, cutting the words short in order to emphasize them and force them past the barrier of her clouded mind, "where did you get the bracelet?"

Kennedy repeated the question and strained his ears to catch the half-coherent words that struggled to the surface.

The continued questioning and the interval of time which gave outraged nature a chance to assert her recuperative powers were having their effects.

For a moment her eyes opened and she gave a glassy stare about, seeing nothing perhaps but the unfamiliar faces about her. At least it seemed to start a train of thought, though one which she could not control.

"Nothing of what?" urged Kennedy, lest her own mental censorship should gain control and stop her tongue.

The effort was growing too much for her. Kennedy leaned over again. We followed anxiously. What if it should be lost now, when we had gone so far?

Hastily he seized a cloth and dipped it in some water near at hand, passed it over her face and fanned the fresh air to her fevered nostrils. The coolness of the water on her face and on her parched lips seemed momentarily to revive the fleeting brain processes.

"Meet where?" he urged persuasively. Apparently her mind was making an effort to recall, for her own satisfaction, just where. Her lips moved in response to some uncontrolled motor-impulse.

The effort was too much for her. She repeated it, "Nichi—morning—six," as people will when they are vibrating on the border-line of anesthesia. Her lips moved, as she said the words over and over, but no sound came from them. She had lapsed again into the stupor of insensibility.

The spell seemed to have fallen for the moment on him. He was thinking aloud himself.

Mechanically he looked at his watch. We had been up all night. It was nearly that hour now. The sight of the watch, of something tangible, seemed to stimulate his mind. He snapped it back into his pocket as if it had been in some way instrumental in starting him on the right track.

"I have it," he almost shouted. "Nichi Moto's—because as far as they knew he was the only one not suspected. Nichi could get them tickets, disguises, everything that would enable a safe flight from the city."

It was at least a better hypothesis than any of the rest of us could furnish. As Kennedy reconsidered it, it seemed even more plausible.

He was hastily reaching for his coat which hung over the back of a chair, talking rapidly to the coroner as he did so.

"Leslie," he directed, "I can trust you to finish up here. You know better than I do what to do for her. Don't miss a word either. Trust your own judgment—have her removed to a hospital if she seems strong enough—only have a nurse with her every moment—don't miss a thing—we may need it yet."

WE were quickly on the sidewalk before Sinclair's travel-stained car which had carried us successfully through so many tight places during the night. A passer-by looked back at us and shook his head, as if to say that we were a crowd of revelers who had turned night into day at the cabaret, much to his disgust. The morning air seemed to revive our drooping energies, however, and I sprang forward to crank the engine while Sinclair himself slid into the seat in front.

Mrs. Hawley, who had been tacitly accepted as one of us, seemed naturally to take the other front seat, and somehow Burke and Morelos, Kennedy and myself managed to squeeze into the rear.

"Nichi Moto?" I overheard Mrs. Hawley say to Sinclair. "He knew Valcour, Neumeyer—all. He used to come here to the cabaret, though I didn't know they ever went to the curio-shop."

"I don't know as they did," returned Sinclair, rounding the corner into the avenue and narrowly avoiding a milk-wagon.

WE stopped a few minutes later before the ramshackle row of buildings in which was the curio-shop, and I noted with some relief that on all sides they were surrounded by sky-scrapers that offered about as much chance of escape from the rear as the precipitate ledges of a canon.

Kennedy bounded up to the door and unceremoniously broke the glass, preferring to take the consequences of a forcible entry to the loss of precious moments at such a crucial time.

Sure enough, seated in the alcove of the tokonoma were two roughly dressed men who looked as if they might have been newly arrived Italian immigrant-laborers. Kennedy's automatic covered them before they were fairly on their feet.

"Not a word!" he shouted as they began gesticulating and protesting. "I've been in this business long enough to read features —not clothes—Alvarez and Sanchez!"

Clever though the disguises were, including one lying on a chair, which was to have transformed the Señora into a Sicilian belle, it was indeed the men we sought—Alvarez and Sanchez.

For a moment they glared at Morelos, then suddenly at us as they realized that he, too, was in custody and had not been the informer who had led us there—although they had no reason, outside of first appearances, to suspect that.

A few hasty questions served to piece together at least a portion of the story, although these Government supporters were not more disposed to talk on important matters than was the Revolutionary leader, Morelos.

They had left their car over on Long Island and had crept into the city by train through Brooklyn and then by the subway, fearing the spread of an alarm at the bridges and ferries. Then they had separated for the night, Alvarez seeking a cheap lodging-house, Sanchez an all-night restaurant, and Ruiz the Mexican cabaret.

As for means of escape in the morning, they had decided that the Japanese was best able to engineer that, and so they had agreed to meet at the earliest moment at the curio shop and make their way, if possible, out of the country by steerage.

Beyond that, even Kennedy, ably seconded by the bulldozing methods of Burke, was unable to extract anything.

"You may be interested to know, Sanchez," he insinuated finally, "that, while I have a great respect for your mechanical ability, after going over that wire-tapping wireless at Westport, some one double-crossed even you. That outfit was put to a use in your own house for which you never intended it."

Sanchez gazed sullenly now at Kennedy, and I am sure would have throttled or poisoned him with equal pleasure.

"Some one used it to project wireless energy into the air," added Craig quietly.

Sanchez was not able to suppress a look of surprise which was genuine enough. I had been prepared for it and was gazing at Alvarez. He gave no sign of anything. Hastily I turned to Morelos, but Burke, who had been observing his prisoner closely, had evidently seen nothing, for he said nothing, and the slightest tremor on the part of Morelos would have called forth an entirely new catechizing from his captor.

"I'm telling you this," pursued Kennedy quietly, "for your own information. You didn't know anything about it. You— the clever schemer who could conceive of stealing the plans of the gyroscope airship from Colonel Sinclair, using the adventuress Valcour and a burglar's microphone—you, Sanchez, were a dupe. You made the fatal mistake of entrusting them to a woman who loved another."

FOR the first time Morelos allowed his fiery passions to get the upper hand. Kennedy had struck the right chord at last.

With an oath—and Mexican-Spanish is a picturesque language for profanity — he started forward at Sanchez. Quick as a tiger Burke seized him.

"I never had the plans!" ground out Morelos in baffled rage at the fate that had deprived him both of the adventuress who stood ready to dare everything for his love and of the secret which was to have made him the greatest power to be reckoned with in the war.

The outburst of Morelos had scarcely ruffled Kennedy. Gradually he was bringing out the truth of how the stolen plans had cursed every one who had stolen them, successively.

"Valcour having planned to steal them from you, Sanchez," Kennedy went on in even tone, "was the victim of still another. That other went further in diabolical ingenuity than even you had conceived. In a guise which you did not suspect, he accompanied you to Westport, installed his machine in the top of the house where he could tap the local electric power—and then destroyed the airship—made it seem a failure in order to discourage its use until his own government could make use of it. I came here expecting not only to find you, but the final evidence that will catch the real, arch-criminal in the case."

Kennedy paused long enough for us to catch every shade of expression on the faces he confronted, then added—

"I got my first hint of the true state of affairs from a letter that was sent from Mexico City, which I read without opening by a process that I have."

The air of mystery he threw about that simple phrase had its effect. He saw it and went on——

"I need not say anything about the remarkable attempts that are being made by some of your countrymen to form a compact by which you will allow the Japanese to gain a foothold both in Mexico and in South America.

"Those of you on both sides of the Pacific who are using this real or supposed relationship of Japan to the aboriginal races of Mexico as a pretext for establishing such a condition little realize with what a two-edged sword you are playing.

"Is the relationship true?" he proceeded. "I do not know. But I do know that if a scientific hypothesis is useful to politicians, they will use it with scientific certainty. Many today are endeavoring to drag anthropology and ethnology into politics. For the time being it may seem very clever. True or not," he concluded, "in this case, at least, it has ended in disaster for those very persons who thought it most clever."

All the stories I had read of the plotting and counter-plotting against the United States swept through my mind. I wondered just how much truth there was in them. That they were mere inventions seemed now inconceivable.

"Professor Neumeyer, scholar and gentleman, scarcely knew the depths to which some can descend to debauch science. While he was working on problems that were, it may be, tinged a little bit with the inevitable commercialism of the age, he knew nothing of the subtle forces at work under the surface—and the result was that he lost his life because he stood in the way of one whose avarice and race pride stopped at nothing."

"You, Alvarez!" he accused. "You thought you were playing an astute game. But even such masters of intrigue as you can be undone by those who are literally steeped in the fountain of intrigue in the Orient. Only modern science and American common sense in its application have foiled those who have beaten you, almost under your eyes, at your own game."

Kennedy had been rising to a higher and higher pitch of excitement as he proceeded with the untangling of this remarkable case. He had come at last to the point where he could finish it up with a nourish, like the crack of a whip.

"Unless I am totally mistaken," he shot out suddenly, "it was under the seductive influence of these supposed friends of yours —in this very alcove—that Valcour was inveigled, entertained with a cup or two of saké, drugged, robbed of the precious plans which she had determined to hand over to her real lover, poisoned and sent forth with just time enough to reach her hotel and die under circumstances that threw suspicion far away from Nichi Moto's curio-shop. Come—let us see if I am right! I have taken my time in this manner for a purpose."

Kennedy had sprung suddenly toward the stairs into the basement, up which we had seen Otaka come when he had brought us the saké. We stumbled down after him. The door at the foot of the steps was closed, but not locked.

Craig opened it cautiously. It was pitch dark in spite of the bright sunshine outside now. We entered gingerly.

We had not proceeded a step before, on the floor, I saw vaguely two dark heaps. My foot touched one of them. It yielded in a most uncanny way. I drew back in instinctive horror at the mere feel of it.

KENNEDY struck a light, and, as we looked, we could discern within its circle of illumination a ghastly scene.

"Hari-kiri!" Craig ejaculated. "While we talked upstairs, they must have realized that they were discovered and that there was no way of escape!"

Nichi Moto and his Aino servant had committed suicide with the deadly arrow-poison which they had used to send two of their supposed friends to their death.

On the hearth of an old kitchen-range was a piece of porphyry, smashed into a thousand bits.

"Then the clue to the treasure is lost!" gasped Hattie Hawley, almost fainting at the sight of the tragedy.

Craig had dropped down on his knees before the fireplace and was poking eagerly in a pile of charred paper and linen, forgetful of the murderers of Valcour for the plans and of Neumeyer for the buried treasure.

"Sinclair, your secret is safe," he cried. "The duplicate plans have been destroyed!"

THE END