THE LOVE-METER

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We found Anitra crying softly to herself, while near her
sat Eulalia, tearless, stunned by the blow, broken-hearted.

Hastily Kennedy read through the open letter.
Its tone seemed to be that of a threat.

For a fleeting instant she looked startled. Yet she betrayed
nothing as to whether it was through fear or surprise.

I saw that some one else in another doorway was watching
them, too, so intently that he did not see me. It was Sandoval.

Studying the three, while I could not escape the rivalry of the two men, I was unable to see or recollect anything that had happened which would convey even an inkling of Anitra's feelings toward them. Yet I was convinced that that way lay a problem quite as important as the relations between the other triangle of Eulalia Teresa, and Barrios. I was not psychologist enough to deal with either triangle. There was something that distinctly called for the higher mathematics of Kennedy.

DETERMINED not to return to him entirely empty-mouthed, I thought it would be a good opportunity to see Eulalia alone, and hurried to the elevator which whisked me up to the Barrios apartment. Doctor Scott had not left his patient

"No change," he whispered, "except that he is reaching a crisis."

Interested as I was in the patient, it had been for the purpose of seeing Eulalia that I had come, and I was glad when Doctor Scott left us for a moment.

"Has Mr. Kennedy found out anything yet?" she asked.

"I think he is on the right track now," I encouraged. "Has anything happened here? Remember—it is important that you should tell him all."

She looked at me a moment, then drew a telegram from a fold of her waist. I took it and read:

BEWARE OF TERESA DE LEON, HOTEL PAN-AMERICA. A FRIEND.

"You know her?" I asked, folding the telegram but not returning it.

Eulalia shook her head.

"I have no idea who she is."

"Or who sent the telegram?"

"None at all."

"When did you receive it?"

"Only a few minutes ago."

Here was another mystery. Who had sent the anonymous telegram to Eulalia so soon after it had been evident that Kennedy had entered the case?

"I may keep this?" I asked, indicating the telegram.

"I was about to send it to Professor Kennedy," she replied. "Oh, I hope he will find something! Won't you go to him and tell him to hurry?"

I needed no urging, not only for her sake but also because I did not wish to be seen or to have the receipt of the telegram by Kennedy known so soon.

In the hotel, I stopped only long enough to see that Anitra was now hurrying toward the elevator, eager to get back to her brother. What had become of Page and the sinister watcher whom he had not seen I did not know, nor did I have time to find out.

A few moments later, I rejoined Kennedy at the laboratory. He was still immersed in work and, scarcely stopping, nodded to me to tell what I had discovered. He listened with interest until I came to the receipt of the anonymous telegram.

"Did you get it?" he asked eagerly.

He almost seized it from my hands as I pulled it out of my pocket and studied it intently.

"Strange," he muttered. "Any of them might have sent it."

"Have you discovered anything?" I asked. "Do you know yet how the thing was done?"

"I think I do," he replied abstractedly.

"How was it?" I prompted, for his mind was now on the telegram.

"A poison-gas pistol," he resumed, coming back to the work he had just been doing. "Instead of bullets, this pistol uses cartridges charged with some deadly powder. It might have been something like the anesthetic pistol devised by the police authorities in Paris, some years ago, when the motor-bandits were operating."

"But who could have used it?" I asked.

Kennedy did not answer directly. He did not feel that the time was ripe to hazard a theory.

"In this case," he continued, after a moment's thought, "I shouldn't be surprised if even the wielder of the pistol wore a mask, doubly effective for disguise and to protect the wielder from the fumes that were to overcome the victim."

"You have no idea who it was?" I reiterated.

Before Kennedy could answer, there came a violent ring at the laboratory-bell, and I hurried to the door. It was one of the bell-boys from the hotel where the Barrios had their apartment with a message for Kennedy. Craig tore it open and read it hurriedly.

"From Doctor Scott," he said briefly. "Barrios is dead."

Even though I had been prepared for the news by my last visit, death came as a shock, as it always does. I had felt all along that Kennedy had been called in too late to do anything to save Barrios, and I had been hoping against hope. But I knew that it was not too late to catch the criminal who had done the dastardly, heartless deed. A few hours, and perhaps all clues might have been covered up. But there is always something that goes wrong with crime, always some point where murder cannot be covered up. I think if people could only be got to realize it, as my experience both on the Star and with Kennedy have impressed it on me, murder would become a lost art.

Without another word, Kennedy seized his hat, and we hurried to the hotel.

WE found Anitra crying softly to herself, while near her sat Eulalia, tearless, stunned by the blow, broken-hearted. In the realization of the tragedy, everything had been forgotten, even the mysterious anonymous telegram signed, Judas-like, "A Friend."

Sandoval, we learned, had been there when the end came, and had now gone out to make what arrangements were necessary. I had nothing against the man, but I could not help feeling that, now that the business was all Anitra's, might he not be the one to profit most by the death? The fact was that Kennedy had expressed so little opinion on the case so far that I might be pardoned for suspecting anyone—even Teresa de Leon, who must have seen José slipping away from her in spite of her pursuit, whatever actuated it. It was while I was in the midst of these fruitless speculations that Doctor Scott beckoned us outside, and we withdrew quietly.

"I don't know that there is anything more that I can do," he remarked, "but I promised Señor Sandoval that I would stay here until he came back. He begged me to, seems scarcely to know how to do enough to comfort his sister and Señorita Barrios."

I listened to the doctor keenly. Was it possible that Sandoval had one of those Jekyll-Hyde natures which seem to be so common in some of us? Had his better nature yielded to his worse? To my mind, that has often been an explanation of crime, though never an adequate defense.

Kennedy was about to say something when the elevator door down the hall opened. I expected that it was Sandoval returning, but it was Burton Page.

"They told me you were here," he said, greeting us. "I have been looking all over for you, down at your laboratory and at your apartment. Would you mind stepping down around the bend in the hall?"

We excused ourselves from Doctor Scott, wondering what Page had to reveal.

"I knew Sandoval had not returned," he began, as soon as we were out of earshot of the doctor, "and I don't want to see him again—not after what happened this afternoon. The man is crazy."

We had reached an alcove and sank down into a soft settee.

"Why, what was that?" I asked, recalling the look of hate on the man's face as he had watched Page talking to Anitra in the tea-room.

"I'm giving you this for what it may be worth," began Page, turning from me to Kennedy. "Down in the lobby this afternoon, after you had been gone some time, I happened to run into Sandoval. He almost seized hold of me. 'You have been at the office,' he said; 'you've been rummaging around there.' Well, I denied it flatly. 'Who took those letters?' he shot back at me. All I could do was to look at him. 'I don't know about any letters—what letters?' I asked. Oh, he's a queer fellow, all right! I thought he was going to kill me by the black look he gave me. He cooled down a bit, but I didn't wait for any apology. The best thing to do with these hot-headed people is to cut out and let them alone."

"How do you account for his strange actions?" asked Kennedy. "Have you ever heard anything more that he did?"

Page shrugged his shoulders as if in doubt whether to say anything, then decided quickly.

"The other day, I heard Barrios and Sandoval in the office. They were quite excited. Barrios was talking loudly. Sandoval had gone to him, as the head of the family, following their custom, I believe, to ask whether he might seek to win Anitra."

"Have you ever heard of Teresa de Leon?" interrupted Kennedy suddenly.

Page looked at him and hesitated.

"There's some scandal there, I'm afraid." he nodded, combining his answers. "I heard Sandoval say something about her to Barrios that day—warn him against something. That was when the argument was heated. It seemed to make Barrios angry. Sandoval said something about Barrios refusing to let him court Anitra while, at the same time, Barrios was engaged to Eulalia. Barrios retorted that the cases were different. He said he had decided that Anitra was going to marry an American millionaire."

There could be no doubt about how Page himself interpreted the remark. It was evident that he took it to mean himself.

"Sandoval had warned him against this de Leon?" asked Kennedy, evidently having in mind the anonymous telegram.

"Something—I don't know what it was all about," returned Page, then added, in a burst of confidence: "I never heard of the lady until she came to New York and introduced herself to me. For a time she was interesting; but I'm too old for that sort of thing. Besides, she always impressed me as though she had some ulterior motive, as though she were trying to get at something through me. I cut it all out."

Kennedy nodded, but, for a moment, said nothing.

"I think I'll be getting out," remarked Page, with a half-smile. "I don't want a knife in my back. I thought you ought to know all this, though."

Kennedy thanked him, and together we rode down in the next elevator, parting with Page at the hotel entrance.

IT was still early in the evening, and Kennedy had no intention now of wasting a moment. He beckoned for a cab and directed the man to drive immediately to the Pan-America. This time, Teresa de Leon was plainly prepared for a visit, though I am not sure that she was prepared to receive two visitors.

"I believe you were acquainted with Señor Barrios, who died to-night?" opened Kennedy, after I had introduced him.

"He was acquainted with me," she corrected, with a purr in her voice that suggested claws.

"You were not married to him," shot out Kennedy, then, before she could reply, "nor even engaged?"

"He had known me a long time. We were intimate—"

"Friends," interrupted Kennedy, leaving no doubt as to the meaning of his emphasis.

She colored. It was evident that, at least to her, it was more than friendship.

"Señor Sandoval says," romanced Kennedy, in true detective style, "that you wrote—"

It was her turn to interrupt.

"If Señor Sandoval says anything against me, he tells what is—not the truth."

In spite of Kennedy's grilling, she was still mistress of herself.

"You introduced yourself to Burton Page and—"

"You had better remember your own proverb," she retorted. "'Don't believe anything you hear and only half you see.'"

Kennedy snapped down the yellow telegram before her. It was a dramatic moment.

The woman did not flinch at the anonymous implication. Straight into Kennedy's eyes she shot a penetrating glance.

"Watch both of them," she replied shortly, then turned and deliberately swept out of the hotel parlor.

"I think we have started forces working for us," remarked Kennedy, coolly consulting his watch. "For the present, at least, let us retire to the laboratory. Some one will make a move. My game is to play one against the other—until the real one breaks."

WE had scarcely switched on the lights, and Kennedy was checking over the results he had obtained during his afternoon's investigations, when the door was flung open and a man dashed in on us unexpectedly. It was Sandoval, and, as he advanced furiously at Kennedy, I more than feared that Page's idea was correct.

"It was you, Kennedy," he hissed, "who took those letters from José's desk! It is you—or Page back of you—who are trying to connect me with that woman, de Leon. But let me tell you—"

A sharp click back of Sandoval caused him to cut short the remark and look about apprehensively. Kennedy's finger, sliding along the edge of the laboratory table, had merely found an electric button by which he could snap the lock on the door.

"We are two to one," returned Kennedy nonchalantly. "That was nothing but the lock on the door closing. Mr. Jameson has a revolver in the top drawer of his desk over there. You will pardon me if I do a little telephoning—through the central office of the detective bureau? Some of our friends may not be over-anxious to come here, and it may be necessary to compel their attendance."

Sandoval subsided into a sullen silence as Kennedy made arrangements to have Burton Page, Anitra, Eulalia, and Teresa de Leon hurried to us at once.

There was nothing for me to do but watch Sandoval as Kennedy prepared a little instrument with a scale and dial, upon which rested an indicator resembling a watch-hand, something like the new horizontal clocks which have only one hand to register seconds, minutes, and hours. In them, like a thermometer held sidewise, the hand moves along from zero to twenty-four. In this instrument, a little needle did the same thing. Pairs of little wire-like strings ran to the instrument.

Kennedy had finished adjusting another instrument, which was much like the saccharimeter, only more complicated, when the racing of an engine outside announced the arrival of the party in one of the police-department cars.

Between us, Craig and I lost no time in disposing the visitors so that each was in possession of a pair of the wire-like strings, and then, disdaining to explain why he had gathered them together so unceremoniously, Kennedy turned and finished adjusting the other apparatus.

"Most people regard light, so abundant, so necessary, so free, as a matter of course," he remarked contemplatively. "Not one person in ten thousand ever thinks of its mysterious nature or ever attempts to investigate it. In fact, most of us are in utter darkness as to light." He paused, tapped the machine, and went on. "This is a polarimeter—a simple polariscope—a step beyond the saccharimeter," he explained, with a nod at Sandoval. "It detects differences of structure in substances not visible in ordinary light.

"Light is polarized in several ways—by reflection, by transmission, but most commonly through what I have here, a prism of calcite or Iceland spar, commonly called a Nicol prism. Light fully polarized consists of vibrations transverse to the direction of the ray, all in one plane. Ordinary light has transverse vibrations in all planes. Certain substances, owing to their molecular structure, are transparent to vibrations in one plane but opaque to those at right angles.

"Here we have," he explained, tapping the parts in order, "a source of light, passing in through this aperture; here, a Nicol polarizer; next, a liquid, to be examined in a glass-capped tube; here, on this other side, an arrangement of quartz plates with rotary power which I shall explain in a moment; next, an analyzer, and, finally, the aperture for the eye of an observer."

Kennedy adjusted the glass tube containing the liquid which bore the substance scraped from the cartridge he had picked up in Jose's office.

"Look through the eyepiece, Walter," he directed.

The field appeared halved. He made an adjustment, and at once the field of vision appeared wholly the same tint. When he removed the tube, it was dark.

"If a liquid has not what we call rotatory power, both halves of the double disk appear of the same tint," he explained. "If it has rotatory power, the halves appear of different tints, and the degree of rotation is measured by the alteration of thickness of this double quartz plate necessary to counteract it. It is, as I told Mr. Jameson early to-day, a rather abstruse subject, this of polarized light. I shall not bore you with it, but I think you will see in a moment why it is necessary, perhaps, why some one thought it would never be used.

"What I am getting at now is that some substances with the same chemical formula rotate polarized light to the right, are dextrorotary, as, for instance, what is known as dextrose. Others rotate it to the left, are levorotary, as the substance called levose. Both of them are glucose. So there are substances which give the same chemical reactions which can only be distinguished by their being left or right rotary."

Craig took a bit of crystalline powder and dissolved it in ether. Then he added some strong sulphuric acid. The liquid turned yellow, then slowly a bright scarlet.

Beside the first, he repeated the operation with another similar-looking powder with the identical result.

"Both of those," he remarked, holding up the vials, "were samples of pure veratrin but obtained from different sources. You see the brilliant reaction—unmistakable. But it makes all the difference in the world in this case what was the source of the veratrin. It may mean the guilt or innocence of one of you." He paused to let the significance of his remark sink in. "Veratrin," he resumed, "is a form of hellebore, known to gardeners for its fatal effect on insects. There are white and green hellebore—Veratrum album and Veratrum viride. It is the pure alkaloid, or, rather, one of them, that we have to deal with here—veratrin.

"There are various sources of veratrin. For instance, there is the veratrin that may be derived from the cevadilla seeds which grow in the West Indies and Mexico. It is used, I am informed, by the Germans in their lachrymatory and asphyxiating bombs."

The mention of the West Indies brought, like a flash to my mind, Sandoval and Señorita de Leon.

"Then, too," continued Kennedy, "there is a plant out in our own Western country of which you may have heard, known as the death camas, very fatal to cattle when they eat it. The active principle in this is also veratrin."

I began to see what Kennedy was driving at. If it were veratrin derived from the death camas, it would point toward Page.

"Abderhalden, the great German physiological chemist, has discovered that substances that once get into the blood produce specific ferments. Not long ago, in a case, I showed it by the use of dialyzing membranes. But Abderhalden has found that the polariscope can show it also. And, in this case, only the polariscope can show what chemistry cannot show when we reach the point of testing Señor Barrios's blood—if that becomes necessary." It was plain that Kennedy was confident. "There are other sources of drugs of the nature used in this case to asphyxiate and kill, but the active principle of all is veratrin. The point is—veratrin from what source? The cevadilla is dextrorotary; the death camas is levorotary. Which is it here?"

As I tried to figure out the ramifications of the case. I could see that it was a cruel situation for one or the other of the girls. Was one of Anitra's lovers the murderer of her brother? Or was Eulalia's own brother the murderer of her fiancé? I looked at the faces before me, now tensely watching Kennedy, forgetful of the wire-like strings which they held in their hands. I studied Teresa de Leon intently for a while. She was still the enigma which she had been the first time I saw her.

Kennedy paused long enough to look through the eyepiece again, as if to reassure himself finally that he was right. There was a tantalizing suspense as we waited for the verdict of science on this intensely human tragedy.

Then he turned to the queer instrument over which the needle-hand was moving.

"Though some scientists would call this merely a sensitive form of galvanometer," he remarked, "it is, to me, more than that. It registers feelings, emotions. It has been registering your own, every moment that I have been talking.

"But, most of all, it registers the grand passion. I might even call it a love-meter. Love might seem to be a subject which science could not investigate. But even love can be attributed to electrical forces, or, perhaps better, is expressed by the generation of an electric current, as though the attraction between men and women were the giving-off of electrons or radiations of one to the other. I have seen this galvanometer stationary during the ordinary meeting of men and women, yet exhibit all sorts of strange vibrations when true lovers meet."

Not used to Kennedy's peculiar methods, they were now on guard, ignorant of the fact that that alone was sufficient to corroborate inescapably any evidence they had already given of their feelings toward each other.

Kennedy passed lightly over the torn and bleeding heart of Eulalia. But, much as he disliked to do so, he could not so quickly pass Anitra. In spite of her grief, I could see that she was striving to control herself. A quick blush suffused her face and her breath came and went faster.

"This record," went on Kennedy, lowering his voice, "tells me that two men are in love with Anitra Barrios. I will not say which exhibits the deeper, truer passion. You shall see for yourself in a moment. But, more than that, it tells me which of the two she cares for more—a secret her heart would not permit her lips to disclose. Nor will I disclose it.

"One of them, with supreme egotism, was so sure that he would win her heart that he plotted this murder of her brother so that she would have the whole estate to bring to him—a terrible price for a dowry. My love-meter tells me, however, that Anitra has something to say about it yet. She does not love this man.

"As for Teresa de Leon, it was jealousy that impelled her to follow José Barrios from Cuba to New York. The murderer, in his scheming, knew it, saw a chance to use her, to encourage her, perhaps throw suspicion on her if necessary. When I came uncomfortably close to him, he even sent an anonymous telegram that might point toward her. It was sent by the same person who stole into Barrios's office and shot him with an asphyxiating pistol which discharged a fatal quantity of pure veratrin full at him.

"My love-meter, in registering hidden emotions, supplements what the polarimeter tells me. It was the levorotary veratrin of the fatal death camas which you used, Page," concluded Craig, as again the electric attachment clicked the lock shut on the laboratory door.

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THE END

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