"But you can trust Mr. Lockwood," he returned. "Surely he is proof against her, against any woman."
Inez flushed. It was evident that of all the men who were interested in the little beauty, Lockwood was first in her mind. Yet when Kennedy put the question thus she hesitated. "Yes," she replied, "of course, I trust him. It is not that woman whom I fear with him."
She said it with an air almost of defiance. There was some kind of struggle going on in her mind, and she was too proud to let us into the secret.
Kennedy rose and bowed. For the present he had come to the conclusion that if she would not let us help her openly the only thing to do was to help her blindly.
Half an hour later we were at Norton"s apartment, not far from the University campus. He listened intently as Kennedy told such parts of what we had done as he chose. At the mention of the arrow poison, he seemed startled beyond measure.
"You are sure of it?" he asked anxiously.
"Positive, now," reiterated Kennedy.
Norton"s face was drawn in deep lines. "If some one has the secret," he cried hastily, "who knows when and on whom next he may employ it?"
Coming from him so soon after the same idea had been hinted at by the coroner, I could not but be impressed by it.
"The very novelty of the thing is our best protection," a.s.serted Kennedy confidently. "Once having discovered it, if Walter gives the thing its proper value in the Star, I think the criminal will be unlikely to try it again. If you had had as much experience in crime as I have had, you would see that it is not necessarily the unusual that is baffling. That may be the surest way to trace it. Often it is because a thing is so natural that it may be attributed to any person among several, equally well."
Norton eyed us keenly, and shook his head. "You may be right," he said doubtfully. "Only I had rather that this person, whoever he may be, had fewer weapons."
"Speaking of weapons," broke in Kennedy, "you have had no further idea of why the dagger might have been taken?"
"There seems to have been so much about it that I did not know," he returned, "that I am almost afraid to have an opinion. I knew that its three-sided sheath inclosed a sharp blade, yet who would have dreamed that that blade was poisoned?"
"You are lucky not to have scratched yourself with it by accident while you were studying it."
"Possibly I might have done it, if I had had it in my possession longer. It was only lately that I had leisure to study it."
"You knew that it might offer some clue to the hidden treasure of Truxillo?" suggested Kennedy. "Have you any recollection of what the inscriptions on it said?"
"Yes," returned Norton, "I had heard the rumours about it. But Peru is a land of tales of buried treasure. No, I can"t say that I paid much more attention to it than you might have done if some one a.s.serted that he had another story of the treasure of Captain Kidd. I must confess that only when the thing was stolen did I begin to wonder whether, after all, there might not be something in it. Now it is too late to find out. From the moment when I found that it was missing from my collection I have heard no more about it than you have found out. It is all like a dream to me. I cannot believe even yet that a mere bit of archaeological and ethnological specimen could have played so important a part in the practical events of real life."
"It does seem impossible," agreed Kennedy. "But it is even more remarkable than that. It has disappeared without leaving a trace, after having played its part."
"If it had been a mere robbery," considered Norton, "one might look for its reappearance, I suppose, in the curio shops. For to-day thieves have a keen appreciation of the value of such objects. But, now that you have unearthed its use against Mendoza--and in such a terrible way--it is not likely that that will be what will happen to it. No, we must look elsewhere."
"I thought I would tell you," concluded Kennedy, rising to go. "Perhaps after you have considered it over night some idea may occur to you."
"Perhaps," said Norton doubtfully. "But I haven"t your brilliant faculty of scientific a.n.a.lysis, Kennedy. No, I shall have to lean on you, in that, not you on me."
We left Norton, apparently now more at sea than ever. At the laboratory Kennedy plunged into some microphotographic work that the case had suggested to him, while I dashed off, under his supervision, an account of the discovery of curare, and telephoned it down to the Star in time to catch the first morning edition, in the hope that it might have some effect in apprising the criminal that we were hard on his trail, which he had considered covered.
I scanned the other papers eagerly in the morning for Kennedy, hoping to glean at least some hints that others who were working on the case might have gathered. But there was nothing, and, after a hasty bite of breakfast, we hurried back to take up the thread of the investigation where we had laid it down.
To our surprise, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, as we approached, we saw Inez Mendoza already waiting for us in a high state of agitation. Her face was pale, and her voice trembled as she greeted us.
"Such a dreadful thing has come to me," she cried, even before Kennedy could ask her what the trouble was.
From her handbag she drew out a crumpled, dirty piece of paper in an envelope.
"It came in the first mail," she explained. "I could not wait to send it to you. I brought it myself. What can it mean?"
Kennedy unfolded the paper. Printed in large characters, in every way similar to the four warnings that had been sent to us, was just one ominous line. We read:
"Beware the man who professes to be a friend of your father."
I glanced from the note to Kennedy, then to Inez. One name was in my mind, and before I knew it I had spoken it.
"Lockwood?" I queried inadvertently.
Her eyes met mine in sharp defiance. "Impossible," she exclaimed. "It is some one trying to injure him with me. Beware of Mr. Lockwood? How absurd!"
Yet it must have meant Lockwood. No one else could have been meant. It was he, most of all, who might be called a friend of her father. She seemed to see the implication without a word from us.
I could not help sympathizing with the brave girl in her struggle between the attack against Lockwood and her love and confidence in him.
It did not need words to tell me that evidence must be overwhelming to convince her that her lover might be involved in any manner.
IX
THE PAPER FIBRES
Kennedy examined the anonymous letter carefully for several minutes, while we watched him in silence.
"Too clever to use a typewriter," he remarked, still regarding the note through the lens of a hand-gla.s.s. "Almost any one would have used a machine. That would have been due to the erroneous idea that typewriting cannot be detected. The fact is that the typewriter is perhaps a worse means of concealing ident.i.ty than is disguised handwriting, especially printing like this. It doesn"t afford the effective protection to the criminal that one supposes. On the contrary, the typewriting of such a note may be the direct means by which it can be traced to its source. We can determine what kind of machine it was done with, then what particular machine was used can be identified."
He paused and indicated a number of little instruments which he had taken from a drawer and laid on the table, as he tore off a bit of the corner of the sheet of paper and examined it.
"There is one thing I can do now, though," he continued. "I can study the quality of the paper in this sheet. If it were only torn like those warnings we have already received, it might perhaps be mated with another piece as accurately as if the act had been performed before our eyes."
He picked up a little instrument with a small curved arm and a finely threaded screw that brought the two flat surfaces of the arm and the end of the screw together.
"There is no such good fortune in this case, however," he resumed, placing the paper between the two small arms. "But by measurements made by this vernier micrometer caliper I can find the precise thickness of the paper as compared to the other samples."
He turned to a microscope and placed the corner of the paper under it.
Then he drew from the drawer the four sc.r.a.ps of paper which had already been sent to us, as well as a pile of photographs.
"Under ordinary circ.u.mstances," he explained, "I should think that what I am doing would be utterly valueless as a clue to anything. But we are reduced to the minutiae in this affair. And to-day science is not ready to let anything pa.s.s as valueless."
He continued to look at the various pieces of paper under the microscope. "I find under microscopic examination," he went on, addressing Inez, but not looking up from the eye-piece as he shifted the papers, "that the note you have received, Senorita Mendoza, is written on a rather uncommon linen bond paper. Later I shall take a number of microphotographs of it. I have here, also, about a hundred microphotographs of the fibres in other kinds of paper, many of them bonds. These I have acc.u.mulated from time to time in my study of the subject. None of them, as you can see, shows fibres resembling this one in question, so that we may conclude that it is of uncommon quality.
"Here I have the fibres, also, of four pieces of paper that have already figured in the case. These four correspond, as well as the indentures of the torn edges. As for the fibres, lest you should question the accuracy of the method, I may say that I know of a case where a man in Germany was arrested, charged with stealing a government bond. He was not searched until later. There was no evidence, save that after the arrest a large number of spitb.a.l.l.s were found around the courtyard under his cell window. This method of comparing the fibres of the regular government paper was used, and by it the man was convicted of stealing the bond. I think it is unnecessary to add that in the present case I can see definitely that not only the four pieces of paper that bore warnings to us were the same kind, but that this whole sheet, with its anonymous warning to you, is also the same."
Inez Mendoza looked at Kennedy as though he possessed some weird power.
Her face, which had already been startled into an expression of fear at his mention of Lockwood, now was pale.