It was toward the close of the afternoon that Carton called up hurriedly. As Kennedy hung up the receiver, I read on his face that something had gone wrong.

"Haddon has disappeared," he announced, "mysteriously and suddenly, without leaving so much as a clue. It seems that he found in his office a package exactly like that which was sent to Carton earlier in the day. He didn't wait to say anything about it, but left. Carton is bringing it over here."

Perhaps a quarter of an hour later, Carton himself deposited the package on the laboratory table with an air of relief. We looked eagerly. It was addressed to Haddon at the Mayfair in the same disguised handwriting and was done up in precisely the same fashion.

"Lots of bombs are just scare bombs," observed Craig. "But you never can tell."

Again Kennedy had started to dissect.

"Ah," he went on, "this is the real thing, though, only a little different from the other. A dry battery gives a spark when the lid is slipped back. See, the explosive is in a steel pipe. Sliding the lid off is supposed to explode it. Why, there is enough explosive in this to have silenced a dozen Haddons."

"Do you think he could have been kidnapped or murdered?" I asked. "What is this, anyhow—gang-war?"

"Or perhaps bribed?" suggested Carton.

"I can't say," ruminated Kennedy. "But I can say this: that there is at large in this city a man of great mechanical skill and practical knowledge of electricity and explosives. He is trying to make sure of hiding something from exposure. We must find him."

"And especially Haddon," Carton added quickly. "He is the missing link. His testimony is absolutely essential to the case I am building up."

"I think I shall want to observe Loraine Keith without being observed," planned Kennedy, with a hasty glance at his watch. "I think I'll drop around at this Mayfair I have heard so much about. Will you come?"

"I'd better not," refused Carton. "You know they all know me, and everything quits wherever I go. I'll see you soon."

As we drove in a cab over to the Mayfair, Kennedy said nothing. I wondered how and where Haddon had disappeared. Had the powers of evil in the city learned that he was weakening and hurried him out of the way at the last moment? Just what had Loraine Keith to do with it? Was she in any way responsible? I felt that there were, indeed, no bounds to what a jealous woman might dare.

Beside the ornate grilled doorway of the carriage entrance of the Mayfair stood a gilt-and-black easel with the words, "Tango Tea at Four." Although it was considerably after that time, there was a line of taxi-cabs before the place and, inside, a brave array of late-afternoon and early-evening revellers. The public dancing had ceased, and a cabaret had taken its place.

We entered and sat down at one of the more inconspicuous of the little round tables. On a stage, at one side, a girl was singing one of the latest syncopated airs.

"We'll just stick around a while, Walter," whispered Craig. "Perhaps this Loraine Keith will come in."

Behind us, protected both by the music and the rustle of people coming and going, a couple talked in low tones. Now and then a word floated over to me in a language which was English, sure enough, but not of a kind that I could understand.

"Dropped by a flatty," I caught once, then something about a "mouthpiece," and the "bulls," and "making a plant."

"A dip—pickpocket—and his girl, or gun-moll, as they call them," translated Kennedy. "One of their number has evidently been picked up by a detective and he looks to them for a good lawyer, or mouth-piece."

Besides these two there were innumerable other interesting glimpses into the life of this meeting-place for the half-and underworlds. A motion in the audience attracted me, as if some favourite performer were about to appear, and I heard the "gun- moll" whisper, "Loraine Keith."

There she was, a petite, dark-haired, snappy-eyed girl, chic, well groomed, and gowned so daringly that every woman in the audience envied and every man craned his neck to see her better. Loraine wore a tight-fitting black dress, slashed to the knee. In fact, everything was calculated to set her off at best advantage, and on the stage, at least, there was something recherche about her. Yet, there was also something gross about her, too.

Accompanying her was a nervous-looking fellow whose washed-out face was particularly unattractive. It seemed as if the bone in his nose was going, due to the shrinkage of the blood-vessels. Once, just before the dance began, I saw him rub something on the back of his hand, raise it to his nose, and sniff. Then he took a sip of a liqueur.

The dance began, wild from the first step, and as it developed, Kennedy leaned over and whispered, "The danse des Apaches."

It was acrobatic. The man expressed brutish passion and jealousy; the woman, affection and fear. It seemed to tell a story—the struggle of love, the love of the woman against the brutal instincts of the thug, her lover. She was terrified as well as fascinated by him in his mad temper and tremendous superhuman strength. I wondered if the dance portrayed the fact.

The music was a popular air with many rapid changes, but through all there was a constant rhythm which accorded well with the abandon of the swaying dance. Indeed, I could think of nothing so much as of Bill Sykes and Nancy as I watched these two.

It was the fight of two frenzied young animals. He would approach stealthily, seize her, and whirl her about, lifting her to his shoulder. She was agile, docile, and fearful. He untied a scarf and passed it about her; she leaned against it, and they whirled giddily about. Suddenly, it seemed that he became jealous. She would run; he follow and catch her. She would try to pacify him; he would become more enraged. The dance became faster and more furious. His violent efforts seemed to be to throw her to the floor, and her streaming hair now made it seem more like a fight than a dance. The audience hung breathless. It ended with her dropping exhausted, a proper finale to this lowest and most brutal dance.

Panting, flushed, with an unnatural light in their eyes, they descended to the audience and, scorning the roar of applause to repeat the performance, sat at a little table.

I saw a couple of girls come over toward the man.

"Give us a deck, Coke," said one, in a harsh voice.

He nodded. A silver quarter gleamed momentarily from hand to hand, and he passed to one girl stealthily a small white-paper packet. Others came to him, both men and women. It seemed to be an established thing.

"Who is that?" asked Kennedy, in a low tone, of the pickpocket back of us.

"Coke Brodie," was the laconic reply.

"A cocaine fiend?"

"Yes, and a lobbygow for the grapevine system of selling the dope under this new law."

"Where does he get the supply to sell?" asked Kennedy, casually.

The pickpocket shrugged his shoulders.

"No one knows, I suppose," Kennedy commented to me. "But he gets it in spite of the added restrictions and peddles it in little packets, adulterated, and at a fabulous price for such cheap stuff. The habit is spreading like wildfire. It is a fertile means of recruiting the inmates in the vice-trust hotels. A veritable epidemic it is, too. Cocaine is one of the most harmful of all habit-forming drugs. It used to be a habit of the underworld, but now it is creeping up, and gradually and surely reaching the higher strata of society. One thing that causes its spread is the ease with which it can be taken. It requires no smoking-dens, no syringe, no paraphernalia—only the drug itself."

Another singer had taken the place of the dancers. Kennedy leaned over and whispered to the dip.

"Say, do you and your gun-moll want to pick up a piece of change to get that mouthpiece I heard you talking about?"

The pickpocket looked at Craig suspiciously.

"Oh, don't worry; I'm all right," laughed Craig. "You see that fellow, Coke Brodie? I want to get something on him. If you will frame that sucker to get away with a whole front, there's a fifty in it."

The dip looked, rather than spoke, his amazement. Apparently Kennedy satisfied his suspicions.

"I'm on," he said quickly. "When he goes, I'll follow him. You keep behind us, and we'll deliver the goods."

"What's it all about?" I whispered.

"Why," he answered, "I want to get Brodie, only I don't want to figure in the thing so that he will know me or suspect anything but a plain hold-up. They will get him; take everything he has. There must be something on that man that will help us."

Several performers had done their turns, and the supply of the drug seemed to have been exhausted. Brodie rose and, with a nod to Loraine, went out, unsteadily, now that the effect of the cocaine had worn off. One wondered how this shuffling person could ever have carried through the wild dance. It was not Brodie who danced. It was the drug.

The dip slipped out after him, followed by the woman. We rose and followed also. Across the city Brodie slouched his way, with an evident purpose, it seemed, of replenishing his supply and continuing his round of peddling the stuff.

He stopped under the brow of a thickly populated tenement row on the upper East Side, as though this was his destination. There he stood at the gate that led down to a cellar, looking up and down as if wondering whether he was observed. We had slunk into a doorway.

A woman coming down the street, swinging a chatelaine, walked close to him, spoke, and for a moment they talked.

"It's the gun-moll," remarked Kennedy. "She's getting Brodie off his guard. This must be the root of that grapevine system, as they call it."

Suddenly from the shadow of the next house a stealthy figure sprang out on Brodie. It was our dip, a dip no longer but a regular stick-up man, with a gun jammed into the face of his victim and a broad hand over his mouth. Skilfully the woman went through Brodie's pockets, her nimble fingers missing not a thing.

"Now—beat it," we heard the dip whisper hoarsely, "and if you raise a holler, we'll get you right, next time."

Brodie fled as fast as his weakened nerves would permit his shaky limbs to move. As he disappeared, the dip sent something dark hurtling over the roof of the house across the street and hurried toward us.

"What was that?" I asked.

"I think it was the pistol on the end of a stout cord. That is a favourite trick of the gunmen after a job. It destroys at least a part of the evidence. You can't throw a gun very far alone, you know. But with it at the end of a string you can lift it up over the roof of a tenement. If Brodie squeals to a copper and these people are caught, they can't hold them under the pistol law, anyhow."

The dip had caught sight of us, with his ferret eyes in the doorway. Quickly Kennedy passed over the money in return for the motley array of objects taken from Brodie. The dip and his gun- moll disappeared into the darkness as quickly as they had emerged.

There was a curious assortment—the paraphernalia of a drug fiend, old letters, a key, and several other useless articles. The pickpocket had retained the money from the sale of the dope as his own particular honorarium.

"Brodie has led us up to the source of his supply," remarked Kennedy, thoughtfully regarding the stuff. "And the dip has given us the key to it. Are you game to go in?"

A glance up and down the street showed it still deserted. We wormed our way in the shadow to the cellar before which Brodie had stood. The outside door was open. We entered, and Craig stealthily struck a match, shading it in his hands.

At one end we were confronted by a little door of mystery, barred with iron and held by an innocent enough looking padlock. It was this lock, evidently, to which the key fitted, opening the way into the subterranean vault of brick and stone.

Kennedy opened it and pushed back the door. There was a little square compartment, dark as pitch and delightfully cool and damp. He lighted a match, then hastily blew it out and switched on an electric bulb which it disclosed.

"Can't afford risks like that here," he exclaimed, carefully disposing of the match, as our eyes became accustomed to the light.

On every side were pieces of gas-pipe, boxes, and paper, and on shelves were jars of various materials. There was a work-table littered with tools, pieces of wire, boxes, and scraps of metal.

"My word!" exclaimed Kennedy, as he surveyed the curious scene before us, "this is a regular bomb factory—one of the most amazing exhibits that the history of crime has ever produced."



XVIII

THE "COKE" FIEND

I followed him in awe as he made a hasty inventory of what we had discovered. There were as many as a dozen finished and partly finished infernal machines of various sizes and kinds, some of tremendous destructive capacity. Kennedy did not even attempt to study them. All about were high explosives, chemicals, dynamite. There was gunpowder of all varieties, antimony, blasting-powder, mercury cyanide, chloral hydrate, chlorate of potash, samples of various kinds of shot, some of the outlawed soft-nosed dumdum bullets, cartridges, shells, pieces of metal purposely left with jagged edges, platinum, aluminum, iron, steel—a conglomerate mass of stuff that would have gladdened an anarchist.

Kennedy was examining a little quartz-lined electric furnace, which was evidently used for heating soldering irons and other tools. Everything had been done, it seemed, to prevent explosions. There were no open lights and practically no chance for heat to be communicated far among the explosives. Indeed, everything had been arranged to protect the operator himself in his diabolical work.

Kennedy had switched on the electric furnace, and from the various pieces of metal on the table selected several. These he was placing together in a peculiar manner, and to them he attached some copper wire which lay in a corner in a roll.

Under the work-table, beneath the furnace, one could feel the warmth of the thing slightly. Quickly he took the curious affair, which he had hastily shaped, and fastened it under the table at that point, then led the wires out through a little barred window to an air-shaft, the only means of ventilation of the place except the door.

While he was working I had been gingerly inspecting the rest of the den. In a corner, just beside the door, I had found a set of shelves and a cabinet. On both were innumerable packets done up in white paper. I opened one and found it contained several pinches of a white, crystalline substance.

"Little portions of cocaine," commented Kennedy, when I showed him what I had found. "In the slang of the fiends, 'decks.'"

On the top of the cabinet he discovered a little enamelled box, much like a snuff-box, in which were also some of the white flakes. Quickly he emptied them out and replaced them with others from jars which had not been made up into packets.

"Why, there must be hundreds of ounces of the stuff here, to say nothing of the various things they adulterate it with," remarked Kennedy. "No wonder they are so careful when it is a felony even to have it in your possession in such quantities. See how careful they are about the adulteration, too. You could never tell except from the effect whether it was the pure or only a few-per-cent.- pure article."

Kennedy took a last look at the den, to make sure that nothing had been disturbed that would arouse suspicion.

"We may as well go," he remarked. "To-morrow, I want to be free to make the connection outside with that wire in the shaft."

Imagine our surprise, the next morning, when a tap at our door revealed Loraine Keith herself.

"Is this Professor Kennedy?" she asked, gazing at us with a half- wild expression which she was making a tremendous effort to control. "Because if it is, I have something to tell him that may interest Mr. Carton."

We looked at her curiously. Without her make-up she was pallid and yellow in spots, her hands trembling, cold, and sweaty, her eyes sunken and glistening, with pupils dilated, her breathing short and hurried, restless, irresolute, and careless of her personal appearance.

"Perhaps you wonder how I heard of you and why I have come to you," she went on. "It is because I have a confession to make. I saw Mr. Haddon just before he was—kidnapped."

She seemed to hesitate over the word.

"How did you know I was interested?" asked Kennedy keenly.

"I heard him mention your name with Mr. Carton's."

"Then he knew that I was more than a reporter for the Star," remarked Kennedy. "Kidnapped, you say? How?"

She shot a glance half of suspicion, half of frankness, at us.

"That's what I must confess. Whoever did it must have used me as a tool. Mr. Haddon and I used to be good friends—I would be yet."

There was evident feeling in her tone which she did not have to assume. "All I remember yesterday was that, after lunch, I was in the office of the Mayfair when he came in. On his desk was a package. I don't know what has become of it. But he gave one look at it, seemed to turn pale, then caught sight of me. 'Loraine,' he whispered, 'we used to be good friends. Forgive me for turning you down. But you don't understand. Get me away from here—come with me—call a cab.'

"Well, I got into the cab with him. We had a chauffeur whom we used to have in the old days. We drove furiously, avoiding the traffic men. He told the driver to take us to my apartment—and— and that is the last I remember, except a scuffle in which I was dragged from the cab on one side and he on the other."

She had opened her handbag and taken from it a little snuff-box, like that which we had seen in the den.

"I—I can't go on," she apologised, "without this stuff."

"So you are a cocaine fiend, also?" remarked Kennedy.

"Yes, I can't help it. There is an indescribable excitement to do something great, to make a mark, that goes with it. It's soon gone, but while it lasts I can sing and dance, do anything until every part of my body begins crying for it again. I was full of the stuff when this happened yesterday; had taken too much, I guess."

The change in her after she had snuffed some of the crystals was magical. From a quivering wretch she had become now a self- confident neurasthenic.

"You know where that stuff will land you, I presume?" questioned Kennedy.

"I don't care," she laughed hollowly. "Yes, I know what you are going to tell me. Soon I'll be hunting for the cocaine bug, as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me. Oh, you don't know. There are two souls to the cocainist. One is tortured by the suffering which the stuff brings; the other laughs at the fears and pains. But it brings such thoughts! It stimulates my mind, makes it work without, against my will, gives me such visions—oh, I can not go on. They would kill me if they knew I had come to you. Why have I? Has not Haddon cast me off? What is he to me, now?"

It was evident that she was growing hysterical. I wondered whether, after all, the story of the kidnapping of Haddon might not be a figment of her brain, simply an hallucination due to the drug.

"They?" inquired Kennedy, observing her narrowly. "Who?"

"I can't tell. I don't know. Why did I come? Why did I come?"

She was reaching again for the snuff-box, but Kennedy restrained her.

"Miss Keith," he remarked, "you are concealing something from me. There is some one," he paused a moment, "whom you are shielding."

"No, no," she cried. "He was taken. Brodie had nothing to do with it, nothing. That is what you mean. I know. This stuff increases my sensitiveness. Yet I hate Coke Brodie—oh—let me go. I am all unstrung. Let me see a doctor. To-night, when I am better, I will tell all."

Loraine Keith had torn herself from him, had instantly taken a pinch of the fatal crystals, with that same ominous change from fear to self-confidence. What had been her purpose in coming at all? It had seemed at first to implicate Brodie, but she had been quick to shield him when she saw that danger. I wondered what the fascination might be which the wretch exercised over her.

"To-night—I will see you to-night," she cried, and a moment later she was gone, as unexpectedly as she had come.

I looked at Kennedy blankly.

"What was the purpose of that outburst?" I asked.

"I can't say," he replied. "It was all so incoherent that, from what I know of drug fiends, I am sure she had a deep-laid purpose in it all. It does not change my plans."

Two hours later we had paid a deposit on an empty flat in the tenement-house in which the bomb-maker had his headquarters, and had received a key to the apartment from the janitor. After considerable difficulty, owing to the narrowness of the air-shaft, Kennedy managed to pick up the loose ends of the wire which had been led out of the little window at the base of the shaft, and had attached it to a couple of curious arrangements which he had brought with him. One looked like a large taximeter from a motor cab; the other was a diminutive gas-metre, in looks at least. Attached to them were several bells and lights.

He had scarcely completed installing the thing, whatever it was, when a gentle tap at the door startled me. Kennedy nodded, and I opened it. It was Carton.

"I have had my men watching the Mayfair," he announced. "There seems to be a general feeling of alarm there, now. They can't even find Loraine Keith. Brodie, apparently, has not shown up in his usual haunts since the episode of last night."

"I wonder if the long arm of this vice trust could have reached out and gathered them in, too?" I asked.

"Quite likely," replied Carton, absorbed in watching Kennedy. "What's this?"

A little bell had tinkled sharply, and a light had flashed up on the attachments to the apparatus.

"Nothing. I was just testing it to see if it works. It does, although the end which I installed down below was necessarily only a makeshift. It is not this red light with the shrill bell that we are interested in. It is the green light and the low-toned bell. This is a thermopile."

"And what is a thermopile?"' queried Carton.

"For the sake of one who has forgotten his physics," smiled Kennedy, "I may say this is only another illustration of how all science ultimately finds practical application. You probably have forgotten that when two half-rings of dissimilar metals are joined together and one is suddenly heated or chilled, there is produced at the opposite connecting point a feeble current which will flow until the junctures are both at the same temperature. You might call this a thermo-electric thermometer, or a telethermometer, or a microthermometer, or any of a dozen names."

"Yes," I agreed mechanically, only vaguely guessing at what he had in mind.

"The accurate measurement of temperature is still a problem of considerable difficulty," he resumed, adjusting the thermometer. "A heated mass can impart vibratory motion to the ether which fills space, and the wave-motions of ether are able to reproduce in other bodies motions similar to those by which they are caused. At this end of the line I merely measure the electromotive force developed by the difference in temperature of two similar thermo- electric junctions, opposed. We call those junctions in a thermopile 'couples,' and by getting the recording instruments sensitive enough, we can measure one one-thousandth of a degree.

"Becquerel was the first, I believe, to use this property. But the machine which you see here was one recently invented for registering the temperature of sea water so as to detect the approach of an iceberg. I saw no reason why it should not be used to measure heat as well as cold.

"You see, down there I placed the couples of the thermopile beneath the electric furnace on the table. Here I have the mechanism, operated by the feeble current from the thermopile, opening and closing switches, and actuating bells and lights. Then, too, I have the recording instrument. The thing is fundamentally very simple and is based on well-known phenomena. It is not uncertain and can be tested at any time, just as I did then, when I showed a slight fall in temperature. Of course it is not the slight changes I am after, not the gradual but the sudden changes in temperature."

"I see," said Carton. "If there is a drop, the current goes one way and we see the red light; a rise and it goes the other, and we see a green light."

"Exactly," agreed Kennedy. "No one is going to approach that chamber down-stairs as long as he thinks any one is watching, and we do not know where they are watching. But the moment any sudden great change is registered, such as turning on that electric furnace, we shall know it here."

It must have been an hour that we sat there discussing the merits of the case and speculating on the strange actions of Loraine Keith.

Suddenly the red light flashed out brilliantly.

"What's that?" asked Carton quickly.

"I can't tell, yet," remarked Kennedy. "Perhaps it is nothing at all. Perhaps it is a draught of cold air from opening the door. We shall have to wait and see."

We bent over the little machine, straining our eyes and ears to catch the visual and audible signals which it gave.

Gradually the light faded, as the thermopile adjusted itself to the change in temperature.

Suddenly, without warning, a low-toned bell rang before us and a bright-green light flashed up.

"That can have only one meaning," cried Craig excitedly. "Some one is down there in that inferno—perhaps the bomb-maker himself."

The bell continued to ring and the light to glow, showing that whoever was there had actually started the electric furnace. What was he preparing to do? I felt that, even though we knew there was some one there, it did us little good. I, for one, had no relish for the job of bearding such a lion in his den.

We looked at Kennedy, wondering what he would do next. From the package in which he had brought the two registering machines he quietly took another package, wrapped up, about eighteen inches long and apparently very heavy. As he did so he kept his attention fixed on the telethermometer. Was he going to wait until the bomb- maker had finished what he had come to accomplish?

It was perhaps fifteen minutes after our first alarm that the signals began to weaken.

"Does that mean that he has gone—escaped?" inquired Carton anxiously.

"No. It means that his furnace is going at full power and that he has forgotten it. It is what I am waiting for. Come on."

Seizing the package as he hurried from the room, Kennedy dashed out on the street and down the outside cellar stairs, followed by us.

He paused at the thick door and listened. Apparently there was not a sound from the other side, except a whir of a motor and a roar which might have been from the furnace. Softly he tried the door. It was locked on the inside.

Was the bomb-maker there still? He must be. Suppose he heard us. Would he hesitate a moment to send us all to perdition along with himself?

How were we to get past that door? Really, the deathlike stillness on the other side was more mysterious than would have been the detonation of some of the criminal's explosive.

Kennedy had evidently satisfied himself on one point. If we were to get into that chamber we must do it ourselves, and we must do it quickly.

From the package which he carried he pulled out a stubby little cylinder, perhaps eighteen inches long, very heavy, with a short stump of a lever projecting from one side. Between the stonework of a chimney and the barred door he laid it horizontally, jamming in some pieces of wood to wedge it tighter.

Then he began to pump on the handle vigorously. The almost impregnable door seemed slowly to bulge. Still there was no sign of life from within. Had the bomb-maker left before we arrived?

"This is my scientific sledge-hammer," panted Kennedy, as he worked the little lever backward and forward more quickly—"a hydraulic ram. There is no swinging of axes or wielding of crowbars necessary in breaking down an obstruction like this, nowadays. Such things are obsolete. This little jimmy, if you want to call it that, has a power of ten tons. That ought to be enough."

It seemed as if the door were slowly being crushed in before the irresistible ten-ton punch of the hydraulic ram.

Kennedy stopped. Evidently he did not dare to crush the door in altogether. Quickly he released the ram and placed it vertically. Under the now-yawning door jamb he inserted a powerful claw of the ram and again he began to work the handle.

A moment later the powerful door buckled, and Kennedy deftly swung it outward so that it fell with a crash on the cellar floor.

As the noise reverberated, there came a sound of a muttered curse from the cavern. Some one was there.

We pressed forward.

On the floor, in the weird glare of the little furnace, lay a man and a woman, the light playing over their ghastly, set features.

Kennedy knelt over the man, who was nearest the door.

"Call a doctor, quick," he ordered, reaching over and feeling the pulse of the woman, who had half fallen out of her chair. "They will, be all right soon. They took what they thought was their usual adulterated cocaine—see, here is the box in which it was. Instead, I filled the box with the pure drug. They'll come around. Besides, Carton needs both of them in his fight."

"Don't take any more," muttered the woman, half conscious. "There's something wrong with it, Haddon."

I looked more closely at the face in the half-darkness.

It was Haddon himself.

"I knew he'd come back when the craving for the drug became intense enough," remarked Kennedy.

Carton looked at Kennedy in amazement. Haddon was the last person in the world whom he had evidently expected to discover here.

"How—what do you mean?"

"The episode of the telephone booth gave me the first hint. That is the favourite stunt of the drug fiend—a few minutes alone, and he thinks no one is the wiser about his habit. Then, too, there was the story about his speed mania. That is a frequent failing of the cocainist. The drug, too, was killing his interest in Loraine Keith—that is the last stage.

"Yet under its influence, just as with his lobbygow and lieutenant, Brodie, he found power and inspiration. With him it took the form of bombs to protect himself in his graft."

"He can't—escape this time—Loraine. We'll leave it—at his house—you know—Carton—"

We looked quickly at the work-table. On it was a gigantic bomb of clockwork over which Haddon had been working. The cocaine which was to have given him inspiration had, thanks to Kennedy, overcome him.

Beside Loraine Keith were a suit-case and a Gladstone. She had evidently been stuffing the corners full of their favourite nepenthe, for, as Kennedy reached down and turned over the closely packed woman's finery and the few articles belonging to Haddon, innumerable packets from the cabinet dropped out.

"Hulloa—what's this?" he exclaimed, as he came to a huge roll of bills and a mass of silver and gold coin. "Trying to double-cross us all the time. That was her clever game—to give him the hours he needed to gather what money he could save and make a clean getaway. Even cocaine doesn't destroy the interest of men and women in that," he concluded, turning over to Carton the wealth which Haddon had amassed as one of the meanest grafters of the city of graft.

Here was a case which I could not help letting the Star have immediately. Notes or no notes, it was local news of the first order. Besides, anything that concerned Carton was of the highest political significance.

It kept me late at the office and I overslept. Consequently I did not see much of Craig the next morning, especially as he told me he had nothing special, having turned down a case of a robbery of a safe, on the ground that the police were much better fitted to catch ordinary yeggmen than he was. During the day, therefore, I helped in directing the following up of the Haddon case for the Star.

Then, suddenly, a new front page story crowded this one of the main headlines. With a sigh of relief, I glanced at the new thriller, found it had something to do with the Navy Department, and that it came from as far away as Washington. There was no reason now why others could not carry on the graft story, and I left, not unwillingly. My special work just now was keeping on the trail of Kennedy, and I was glad to go back to the apartment and wait for him.

"I suppose you saw that despatch from Washington in this afternoon's papers?" he queried, as he came in, tossing a late edition of the Record down on my desk.

Across the front page extended a huge black scare-head: "NAVY'S MOST VITAL SECRET STOLEN."

"Yes," I shrugged, "but you can't get me much excited by what the rewrite men on the Record say."

"Why?" he asked, going directly into his own room.

"Well," I replied, glancing through the text of the story, "the actual facts are practically the same as in the other papers. Take this, for instance, 'On the night of the celebration of the anniversary of the battle of Manila there were stolen from the Navy Department plans which the Record learns exclusively represent the greatest naval secret in the world.' So much for that paragraph—written in the office. Then it goes on:

"The whole secret-service machinery of the Government has been put in operation. No one has been able to extract from the authorities the exact secret which was stolen, but it is believed to be an invention which will revolutionise the structure and construction of the most modern monster battleships. Such knowledge, it is said, in the hands of experts might prove fatal in almost any fight in which our newer ships met others of about equal fighting power, as with it marksmen might direct a shot that would disable our ships.

"It is the opinion of the experts that the theft was executed by a skilled draughtsman or other civilian employe. At any rate, the thief knew what to take and its value. There is, at least, one nation, it is asserted, which faces the problem of bringing its ships up to the standard of our own to which the plans would be very valuable.

"The building had been thrown open to the public for the display of fireworks on the Monument grounds before it. The plans are said to have been on one of the draughting-tables, drawn upon linen to be made into blue-prints. They are known to have been on the tables when the draughting-room was locked for the night.

"The room is on the third floor of the Department and has a balcony looking out on the Monument. Many officers and officials had their families and friends on the balcony to witness the celebration, though it is not known that any one was in the draughting-room itself. All were admitted to the building on passes. The plans were tacked to a draughting-board in the room, but when it was opened in the morning the linen sheet was gone, and so were the thumb-tacks. The plans could readily have been rolled into a small bundle and carried under a coat or wrap.

"While the authorities are trying to minimise the actual loss, it is believed that this position is only an attempt to allay the great public concern."

I paused. "Now then," I added, picking up one of the other papers I had brought up-town myself, "take the Express. It says that the plans were important, but would have been made public in a few months, anyhow. Here:

"The theft—or mislaying, as the Department hopes it will prove to be—took place several days ago. Official confirmation of the report is lacking, but from trustworthy unofficial sources it is learned that only unimportant parts of plans are missing, presumably minor structural details of battle-ship construction, and other things of a really trivial character, such as copies of naval regulations, etc.

"The attempt to make a sensational connection between the loss and a controversy which is now going on with a foreign government is greatly to be deplored and is emphatically asserted to be utterly baseless. It bears traces of the jingoism of those 'interests' which are urging naval increases.

"There is usually very little about a battle-ship that is not known before her keel is laid, or even before the signing of the contracts. At any rate, when it is asserted that the plans represent the dernier cri in some form of war preparation, it is well to remember that a 'last cry' is last only until there is a later. Naval secrets are few, anyway, and as it takes some years to apply them, this loss cannot be of superlative value to any one. Still, there is, of course, a market for such information in spite of the progress toward disarmament, but the rule in this case will be the rule as in a horse trade, 'Caveat emptor.'"

"So there you are," I concluded. "You pay your penny for a paper, and you take your choice."

"And the Star," inquired Kennedy, coming to the door and adding with an aggravating grin, "the infallible?"

"The Star," I replied, unruffled, "hits the point squarely when it says that whether the plans were of immediate importance or not, the real point is that if they could be stolen, really important things could be taken also. For instance, 'The thought of what the thief might have stolen has caused much more alarm than the knowledge of what he has succeeded in taking.' I think it is about time those people in Washington stopped the leak if—"

The telephone rang insistently.

"I think that's for me," exclaimed Craig, bounding out of his room and forgetting his quiz of me. "Hello—yes—is that you, Burke? At the Grand Central—half an hour—all right. I'm bringing Jameson. Good-bye."

Kennedy jammed down the receiver on the hook.



XIX

THE SUBMARINE MYSTERY

"The Star was not far from right, Walter," he added, seriously. "If the battleship plans could be stolen, other things could be— other things were. You remember Burke of the secret service? I'm going up to Lookout Hill on the Connecticut shore of the Sound with him to-night. The rewrite men on the Record didn't have the facts, but they had accurate imaginations. The most vital secret that any navy ever had, that would have enabled us in a couple of years to whip the navies of the world combined against us, has been stolen."

"And that is?" I asked.

"The practical working-out of the newest of sciences, the science of telautomatics."

"Telautomatics?" I repeated.

"Yes. There is something weird, fascinating about the very idea. I sit up here safely in this room, turning switches, pressing buttons, depressing levers. Ten miles away a vehicle, a ship, an aeroplane, a submarine obeys me. It may carry enough of the latest and most powerful explosive that modern science can invent, enough, if exploded, to rival the worst of earthquakes. Yet it obeys my will. It goes where I direct it. It explodes where I want it. And it wipes off the face of the earth anything which I want annihilated.

"That's telautomatics, and that is what has been stolen from our navy and dimly sensed by you clever newspaper men, from whom even the secret service can't quite hide everything. The publication of the rumour alone that the government knows it has lost something has put the secret service in a hole. What might have been done quietly and in a few days has got to be done in the glare of the limelight and with the blare of a brass band—and it has got to be done right away, too. Come on, Walter. I've thrown together all we shall need for one night—and it doesn't include any pajamas, either."

A few minutes later we met our friend Burke of the secret service at the new terminal. He had wired Kennedy earlier in the day saying that he would be in New York and would call him up.

"The plans, as I told you in my message," began Burke, when we had seated ourselves in a compartment of the Pullman, "were those of Captain Shirley, covering the wireless-controlled submarine. The old captain is a thoroughbred, too. I've known him in Washington. Comes of an old New England, family with plenty of money but more brains. For years he has been working on this science of radio- telautomatics, has all kinds of patents, which he has dedicated to the United States, too. Of course the basic, pioneer patents are not his. His work has been in the practical application of them. And, Kennedy, there are some secrets about his latest work that he has not patented; he has given them outright to the Navy Department, because they are too valuable even to patent."

Burke, who liked a good detective tale himself, seemed pleased at holding Kennedy spellbound.

"For instance," he went on, "he has on the bay up here a submarine which can be made into a crewless dirigible. He calls it the Turtle, I believe, because that was the name of the first American submarine built by Dr. Bushnell during the Revolution, even before Fulton."

"You have theories of your own on the case?" asked Craig.

"Well, there are several possibilities. You know there are submarine companies in this country, bitter rivals. They might like to have those plans. Then, too, there are foreign governments."

He paused. Though he said nothing, I felt that there was no doubt what he hinted at. At least one government occurred to me which would like the plans above all others.

"Once some plans of a submarine were stolen, I recall," ruminated Kennedy. "But that theft, I am satisfied, was committed in behalf of a rival company."

"But, Kennedy," exclaimed Burke, "it was bad enough when the plans were stolen. Now Captain Shirley wires me that some one must have tampered with his model. It doesn't work right. He even believes that his own life may be threatened. And there is scarcely a real clue," he added dejectedly. "Of course we are watching all the employes who had access to the draughting-room and tracing everybody who was in the building that night. I have a complete list of them. There are three or four who will bear watching. For instance, there is a young attache of one of the embassies, named Nordheim."

"Nordheim!" I echoed, involuntarily. I had expected an Oriental name.

"Yes, a German. I have been looking up his record, and I find that once he was connected in some way with the famous Titan Iron Works, at Kiel, Germany. We began watching him day before yesterday, but suddenly he disappeared. Then, there is a society woman in Washington, a Mrs. Bayard Brainard, who was at the Department that night. We have been trying to find her. To-day I got word that she was summering in the cottage colony across the bay from Lookout Hill. At any rate, I had to go up there to see the captain, and I thought I'd kill a whole flock of birds with one stone. The chief thought, too, that if you'd take the case with us you had best start on it up there. Next, you will no doubt want to go back to Washington with me."

Lookout Hill was the name of the famous old estate of the Shirleys, on a point of land jutting out into Long Island Sound and with a neighbouring point enclosing a large, deep, safe harbour. On the highest ground of the estate, with a perfect view of both harbour and sound, stood a large stone house, the home of Captain Shirley, of the United States navy, retired.

Captain Shirley, a man of sixty-two or three, bronzed and wiry, met us eagerly.

"So this is Professor Kennedy; I'm glad to meet you, sir," he welcomed, clasping Craig's hand in both of his—a fine figure as he stood erect in the light of the portecochere. "What's the news from Washington, Burke? Any clues?"

"I can hardly tell," replied the secret service man. with assumed cheerfulness. "By the way, you'll have to excuse me for a few minutes while I run back into town on a little errand. Meanwhile, Captain, will you explain to Professor Kennedy just how things are? Perhaps he'd better begin by seeing the Turtle herself."

Burke had not waited longer than to take leave.

"The Turtle," repeated the captain, leading the way into the house. "Well, I did call it that at first. But I prefer to call it the Z99. You know the first submarines, abroad at least, were sometimes called Al, A2, A3, and so on. They were of the diving, plunging type, that is, they submerged on an inclined keel, nose down, like the Hollands. Then came the B type, in which the hydroplane appeared; the C type, in which it was more prominent, and a D type, where submergence is on a perfectly even keel, somewhat like our Lakes. Well, this boat of mine is a last word— the Z99. Call it the Turtle, if you like."

We were standing for a moment in a wide Colonial hall in which a fire was crackling in a huge brick fireplace, taking the chill off the night air.

"Let me give you a demonstration, first," added the captain. "Perhaps Z99 will work—perhaps not."

There was an air of disappointment about the old veteran as he spoke, uncertainly now, of what a short time ago he had known to be a certainty and one of the greatest it had ever been given the inventive mind of man to know.

A slip of a girl entered from the library, saw us, paused, and was about to turn back. Silhouetted against the curtained door, there was health, animation, gracefulness, in every line of her wavy chestnut hair, her soft, sparkling brown eyes, her white dress and hat to match, which contrasted with the healthy glow of tan on her full neck and arms, and her dainty little white shoes, ready for anything from tennis to tango.

"My daughter Gladys, Professor Kennedy and Mr. Jameson," introduced the captain. "We are going to try the Z99 again, Gladys."

A moment later we four were walking to the edge of the cliff where Captain Shirley had a sort of workshop and signal-station.

He lighted the gas, for Lookout Hill was only on the edge of the town and boasted gas, electricity, and all modern improvements, as well as the atmosphere of old New England.

"The Z99 is moored just below us at my private dock," began the captain. "I have a shed down there where we usually keep her, but I expected you, and she is waiting, thoroughly overhauled. I have signalled to my men—fellows I can trust, too, who used to be with me in the navy—to cast her off. There—now we are ready."

The captain turned a switch. Instantly a couple of hundred feet below us, on the dark and rippling water, a light broke forth. Another signal, and the light changed.

It was moving.

"The principle of the thing," said Captain Shirley, talking to us but watching the moving light intently, "briefly, is that I use the Hertzian waves to actuate relays on the Z99. That is, I send a child with a message, the grown man, through the relay, so to speak, does the work. So, you see, I can sit up here and send my little David out anywhere to strike down a huge Goliath.

"I won't bore you, yet, with explanations of my radio-combinator, the telecommutator, the aerial coherer relay, and the rest of the technicalities of wireless control of dirigible, self-propelled vessels. They are well known, beginning with pioneers like 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.

"The one thing, you may not know, that has kept us back while wireless telegraphy has gone ahead so fast is that in wireless we have been able to discard coherers and relays and use detectors and microphones in their places. But in telautomatics we have to keep the coherer. That has been the barrier. The coherer until recently has been spasmodic, until we had Hammond's mercury steel- disc coherer and now my own. Why," he cried, "we are just on the threshold, now, of this great science which Tesla has named telautomatics—the electric arm that we can stretch out through space to do our work and fight our battles."

It was not difficult to feel the enthusiasm of the captain over an invention of such momentous possibilities, especially as the Z99 was well out in the harbour now and we could see her flashing her red and green signal-lights back to us.

"You see," the captain resumed, "I have twelve numbers here on the keys of this radio-combinator—forward, back, stop propeller motor, rudder right, rudder left, stop steering motor, light signals front, light signals rear, launch torpedoes, and so on. The idea is that of a delayed contact. The machinery is always ready, but it delays a few seconds until the right impulse is given, a purely mechanical problem. I take advantage of the delay to have the message repeated by a signal back to me. I can even change it, then. You can see for yourself that it really takes no experience to run the thing when all is going right. Gladys has done it frequently herself. All you have to do is to pay attention, and press the right key for the necessary change. It is when things go wrong that even an expert like myself—confound it- -there's something wrong!"

The Z99 had suddenly swerved. Captain Shirley's brow knitted. We gathered around closer, Gladys next to her father and leaning anxiously over the transmitting apparatus.

"I wanted to turn her to port yet she goes to starboard, and signals starboard, too. There—now—she has stopped altogether. What do you think of that?"

Gladys stroked the old seafarer's hand gently, as he sat silently at the table, peering with contracted brows out into the now brilliantly moonlit night.

Shirley looked up at his daughter, and the lines on his face relaxed as though he would hide his disappointment from her eager eyes.

"Confound that light! What's the matter with it?" he exclaimed, changing the subject, and glancing up at the gas-fixture.

Kennedy had already been intently looking at the Welsbach burner overhead, which had been flickering incessantly. "That gas company!" added the Captain, shaking his head in disgust, and showing annoyance over a trivial thing to hide deep concern over a greater, as some men do. "I shall use the electricity altogether after this contract with the company expires. I suppose you literary men, Mr. Jameson, would call that the light that failed."

There was a forced air about his attempt to be facetious that did not conceal, but rather accentuated, the undercurrent of feelings in him.

"On the contrary," broke in Kennedy, "I shouldn't be surprised to find that it is the light that succeeded."

"How do you mean?"

"I wouldn't have said anything about it if you hadn't noticed it yourself. In fact, I may be wrong. It suggests something to me, but it will need a good deal of work to verify it, and then it may not be of any significance. Is that the way the Z99 has behaved always lately?"

"Yes, but I know that she hasn't broken down of herself," Captain Shirley asserted. "It never did before, not since I perfected that new coherer. And now it always does, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes after I start her out."

Shirley was watching the lights as they serpentined their way to us across the nearly calm water of the bay, idly toying with the now useless combinator.

"Wait here," he said, rising hurriedly. "I must send my motor-boat out there to pick her up and tow her in."

He was gone down the flight of rustic steps on the face of the cliff before we could reply.

"I wish father wouldn't take it to heart so," murmured Gladys. "Sometimes I fear that success or failure of this boat means life or death to him."

"That is exactly why we are here," reassured Kennedy, turning earnestly to her, "to help him to settle this thing at once. This is a beautiful spot," he added, as we stood on the edge of the cliff and looked far out over the tossing waves of the sound.

"What is on that other point?" asked Kennedy, turning again toward the harbour itself.

"There is a large cottage colony there," she replied. "Of course many of the houses are still closed so early in the season, but it is a beautiful place in the summer. The hotel over there is open now, though."

"You must have a lively time when the season is at its height," ventured Kennedy. "Do you know a cottager there, a Mrs. Brainard?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. I have known her in Washington for some time."

"No doubt the cottagers envy you your isolation here," remarked Kennedy, turning and surveying the beautifully kept grounds. "I should think it would be pleasant, too, to have an old Washington friend here."

"It is. We often invite our friends over for lawn-parties and other little entertainments. Mrs. Brainard has just arrived and has only had time to return my first visit to her, but I expect we shall have some good times this summer."

It was evident, at least, that Gladys was not concealing anything about her friend, whether there was any suspicion or not of her.

We had gone into the house to await the return of Captain Shirley. Burke had just returned, his face betraying that he was bursting with news.

"She's here, all right," he remarked in an undertone to Kennedy, "in the Stamford cottage—quite an outfit. French chauffeur, two Japanese servants, maids, and all."

"The Stamford cottage?" repeated Gladys. "Why, that is where Mrs. Brainard lives."

She gave a startled glance at Kennedy, as she suddenly seemed to realise that both he and the secret-service man had spoken about her friend.

"Yes," said Burke, noting on the instant the perfect innocence of her concern. "What do you know about Mrs. Brainard? Who, where is, Mr. Brainard?"

"Dead, I believe," Gladys hesitated. "Mrs. Brainard has been well known in Washington circles for years. Indeed, I invited her with us the night of the Manila display."

"And Mr. Nordheim?" broke in Burke.

"N-no," she hesitated. "He was there, but I don't know as whose guest."

"Did he seem very friendly with. Mrs. Brainard?" pursued the detective.

I thought I saw a shade of relief pass over her face as she answered, "Yes." I could only interpret it that perhaps Nordheim had been attentive to Gladys herself and that she had not welcomed his attentions.

"I may as well tell you," she said, at length. "It is no secret in our set, and I suppose you would find it out soon, anyhow. It is said that he is engaged to Mrs. Brainard—that is all."

"Engaged?" repeated Burke. "Then that would account for his being at the hotel here. At least, it would offer an excuse."

Gladys was not slow to note the stress that Burke laid on the last word.

"Oh, impossible," she began hurriedly, "impossible that he could have known anything about this other matter. Why, she told me he was to sail suddenly for Germany and came up here for a last visit before he went, and to arrange to come back on his return. Oh, he could know nothing—impossible."

"Why impossible?" persisted Burke. "They have submarines in Germany, don't they? And rival companies, too."

"Who have rival companies?" inquired a familiar voice. It was Captain Shirley, who had returned out of breath from his long climb up the steps from the shore.

"The Germans. I was speaking of an attache named Nordheim."

"Who is Nordheim?" inquired the captain.

"You met him at the Naval building, that night, don't you remember?" replied Gladys.

"Oh, yes, I believe I do—dimly. He was the man who seemed so devoted to Mrs. Brainard."

"I think he is, too, father," she replied hastily. "He has been suddenly called to Berlin and planned to spend the last few days here, at the hotel, so as to be near her. She told me that he had been ordered back to Washington again before he sailed and had had to cut his visit short."

"When did you first notice the interference with the Turtle?" asked Burke. "I received your message this morning."

"Yesterday morning was the first," replied the captain.

"He arrived the night before and did not leave until yesterday afternoon," remarked Burke.

"And we arrived to-night," put in Craig quietly. "The interference is going on yet."

"Then the Japs," I cut in, at last giving voice to the suspicion I had of the clever little Orientals.

"They could not have stolen the plans," asserted Burke, shaking his head. "No, Nordheim and Mrs. Brainard were the only ones who could have got into the draughting room the night of the Manila celebration."

"Burke," said Kennedy, rising, "I wish you would take me into town. There are a few messages I would like to send. You will excuse us, Captain, for a few hours? Good evening, Miss Shirley." As he bowed I heard Kennedy add to her: "Don't worry about your father. Everything will come out all right soon."

Outside, in the car which Burke had hired, Craig added: "Not to town. That was an excuse not to alarm Miss Shirley too much over her friend. Take us over past the Stamford cottage, first."

The Stamford cottage was on the beach, between the shore front and the road. It was not a new place but was built in the hideous style of some thirty years ago with all sorts of little turned and knobby ornaments. We paused down the road a bit, though not long enough to attract attention. There were lights on every floor of the cottage, although most of the neighbouring cottages were dark.

"Well protected by lightning-rods," remarked Kennedy, as he looked the Stamford cottage over narrowly. "We might as well drive on. Keep an eye on the hotel, Burke. It may be that Nordheim intends to return, after all."

"Assuming that he has left," returned the secret-service man.

"But you said he had left," said Kennedy. "What do you mean?"

"I hardly know myself," wearily remarked Burke, on whom the strain of the case, to which we were still fresh, had begun to tell. "I only know that I called up Washington after I heard he had been at the hotel, and no one at our headquarters knew that he had returned. They may have fallen down, but they were to watch both his rooms and the embassy."

"H-m," mused Kennedy. "Why didn't you say that before?"

"Why, I assumed that he had gone back, until you told me there was interference to-night, too. Now, until I can locate him definitely I'm all at sea—that's all."

It was now getting late in the evening, but Kennedy had evidently no intention of returning yet to Lookout Hill. We paused at the hotel, which was in the centre of the cottage colony, and flanked by a hill that ran back of the colony diagonally and from which a view of both the hotel and the cottages could be obtained. Burke's inquiries developed the fact that Nordheim had left very hurriedly and in some agitation. "To tell you the truth," confided the clerk, with whom Burke had ingratiated himself, "I thought he acted like a man who was watched."

Late as it was, Kennedy insisted on motoring to the railroad station and catching the last train to New York. As there seemed to be nothing that I could do at Lookout Hill, I accompanied him on the long and tedious ride, which brought us back to the city in the early hours of the morning.

We stopped just long enough to run up to the laboratory and to secure a couple of little instruments which looked very much like small incandescent lamps in a box. Then, by the earliest train from New York, we returned to Lookout Hill, with only such sleep as Kennedy had predicted, snatched in the day coaches of the trains and during a brief wait in the station.

A half-hour's freshening up with a dip in the biting cold water of the bay, breakfast with Captain Shirley and Miss Gladys, and a return to the excitement of the case, had to serve in place of rest. Burke disappeared, after a hasty conference with Kennedy, presumably to watch Mrs. Brainard, the hotel, and the Stamford cottage to see who went in and out.

"I've had the Z99 brought out of its shed," remarked the captain, as we rose from the breakfast-table. "There was nothing wrong as far as I could discover last night or by a more careful inspection this morning. I'd like to have you take a look at her now, in the daylight."

"I was about to suggest," remarked Kennedy, as we descended the steps to the shore, "that perhaps, first, it might be well to take a short run in her with the crew, just to make sure that there is nothing wrong with the machinery."

"A good idea," agreed the captain.

We came to the submarine, lying alongside the dock and looking like a huge cigar. The captain preceded us down the narrow hatchway, and I followed Craig. The deck was cleared, the hatch closed, and the vessel sealed.



XX

THE WIRELESS DETECTOR

Remembering Jules Verne's enticing picture of life on the palatial Nautilus, I may as well admit that I was not prepared for a real submarine. My first impression, as I entered the hold, was that of discomfort and suffocation. I felt, too, that I was too close to too much whirring machinery. I gazed about curiously. On all sides were electrical devices and machines to operate the craft and the torpedoes. I thought, also, that the water outside was uncomfortably close; one could almost feel it. The Z99 was low roofed, damp, with an intricate system of rods, controls, engines, tanks, stop-cocks, compasses, gauges—more things than it seemed the human mind, to say nothing of wireless, could possibly attend to at once.

"The policy of secrecy which governments keep in regard to submarines," remarked the captain, running his eye over everything at once, it seemed, "has led them to be looked upon as something mysterious. But whatever you may think of telautomatics, there is really no mystery about an ordinary submarine."

I did not agree with our "Captain Nemo," as, the examination completed, he threw in a switch. The motor started. The Z99 hummed and trembled. The fumes of gasoline were almost suffocating at first, in spite of the prompt ventilation to clear them off. There was no escape from the smell. I had heard of "gasoline heart," but the odour only made me sick and dizzy. Like most novices, I suppose, I was suffering excruciating torture. Not so, Kennedy. He got used to it in no time; indeed, seemed to enjoy the very discomfort.

I felt that there was only one thing necessary to add to it, and that was the odour of cooking. Cooking, by the way, on a submarine is uncertain and disagreeable. There was a little electric heater, I found, which might possibly have heated enough water for one cup of coffee at a time.

In fact, space was economised to the utmost. Only the necessaries of life were there. Every inch that could be spared was given over to machinery. It was everywhere, compact, efficient—everything for running the boat under water, guiding it above and below, controlling its submersion, compressing air, firing torpedoes, and a thousand other things. It was wonderful as it was. But when one reflected that all could be done automatically, or rather telautomatically, it was simply astounding.

"You see," observed Captain Shirley, "when she is working automatically neither the periscope nor the wireless-mast shows. The wireless impulses are carried down to her from an inconspicuous float which trails along the surface and carries a short aerial with a wire running down, like a mast, forming practically invisible antennae."

As he was talking the boat was being "trimmed" by admitting water as ballast into the proper tanks.

"The Z99," he went on, "is a submersible, not a diving, submarine. That is to say, the rudder guides it and changes the angle of the boat. But the hydroplanes pull it up and down, two pairs of them set fore and aft of the centre of gravity. They lift or lower the boat bodily on an even keel, not by plunging and diving. I will now set the hydroplanes at ten degrees down and the horizontal rudder two degrees up, and the boat will submerge to a depth of thirty feet and run constant at that depth."

He had shut off the gasoline motor and started the storage-battery electric motor, which was used when running submerged. The great motors gave out a strange, humming sound. The crew conversed in low, constrained tones. There was a slightly perceptible jar, and the boat seemed to quiver just a bit from stem to stern. In front of Shirley was a gauge which showed the depth of submergence and a spirit-level which showed any inclination.

"Submerged," he remarked, "is like running on the surface under dense-fog conditions."

I did not agree with those who have said there is no difference running submerged or on the surface. Under way on the surface was one thing. But when we dived it was most unpleasant. I had been reassured at the start when I heard that there were ten compressed-air tanks under a pressure of two thousand pounds to the square inch. But only once before had I breathed compressed air and that was when one of our cases once took us down into the tunnels below the rivers of New York. It was not a new sensation, but at fifty feet depth I felt a little tingling all over my body, a pounding of the ear-drums, and just a trace of nausea.

Kennedy smiled as I moved about. "Never mind, Walter," he said. "I know how you feel on a first trip. One minute you are choking from lack of oxygen, then in another part of the boat you are exhilarated by too much of it. Still," he winked, "don't forget that it is regulated."

"Well," I returned, "all I can say is that if war is hell, a submarine is war."

I had, however, been much interested in the things about me. Forward, the torpedo-discharge tubes and other apparatus about the little doors in the vessel's nose made it look somewhat like the shield used in boring a tunnel under compressed air.

"Ordinary torpedo-boats use the regular automobile torpedo," remarked Captain Shirley, coming ubiquitously up behind me. "I improve on that. I can discharge the telautomobile torpedo, and guide it either from the boat, as we are now, or from the land station where we were last night, at will."

There was something more than pride in his manner. He was deadly in earnest about his invention.

We had come over to the periscope, the "eye" of the submarine when she is running just under the surface, but of no use that we were below. "Yes," he remarked, in answer to my half-spoken question, "that is the periscope. Usually there is one fixed to look ahead and another that is movable, in order to take in what is on the sides and in the rear. I have both of those. But, in addition, I have the universal periscope, the eye that sees all around, three hundred and sixty degrees—a very clever application of an annular prism with objectives, condenser, and two eyepieces of low and high power."

A call from one of the crew took him into the stern to watch the operation of something, leaving me to myself, for Kennedy was roaming about on a still hunt for anything that might suggest itself. The safety devices, probably more than any other single thing, interested me, for I had read with peculiar fascination of the great disasters to the Lutin, the Pluviose, the Farfardet, the A8, the Foca, the Kambala, the Japanese No 6, the German U3, and others.

Below us I knew there was a keel that could be dropped, lightening the boat considerably. Also, there was the submarine bell, immersed in a tank of water, with telephone receivers attached by which one could "listen in," for example, before rising, say, from sixty feet to twenty feet, and thus "hear" the hulls of other ships. The bell was struck by means of air pressure, and was the same as that used for submarine signalling on ships. Water, being dense, is an excellent conductor of sound. Even in the submarine itself, I could hear the muffled clang of the gong.

Then there were buoys which could be released and would fly to the surface, carrying within them a telephone, a light, and a whistle. I knew also something of the explosion dangers on a submarine, both from the fuel oil used when running on the surface, and from the storage batteries used when running submerged. Once in a while a sailor would take from a jar a piece of litmus paper and expose it, showing only a slight discolouration due to carbon dioxide. That was the least of my troubles. For a few moments, also, the white mice in a cage interested me. White mice were carried because they dislike the odour of gasoline and give warning of any leakage by loud squeals.

The fact was that there was so much of interest that, the first discomfort over, I was, like Kennedy, beginning really to enjoy the trip.

I was startled suddenly to hear the motors stop. There was no more of that interminable buzzing. The Z99 responded promptly to the air pressure that was forcing the water out of the tanks. The gauge showed that we were gradually rising on an even keel. A man sprang up the narrow hatchway and opened the cover through which we could see a little patch of blue sky again. The gasoline motor was started, and we ran leisurely back to the dock. The trip was over—safely. As we landed I felt a sense of gladness to get away from that feeling of being cut off from the world. It was not fear of death or of the water, as nearly as I could analyse it, but merely that terrible sense of isolation from man and nature as we know it.

A message from Burke was waiting for Kennedy at the wharf. He read it quickly, then handed it to Captain Shirley and myself.

Have just received a telegram from Washington. Great excitement at the embassy. Cipher telegram has been despatched to the Titan Iron Works. One of my men in Washington reports a queer experience. He had been following one of the members of the embassy staff, who saw he was being shadowed, turned suddenly on the man, and exclaimed, "Why are you hounding us still?" What do you make of it? No trace yet of Nordheim

BURKE.

The lines in Craig's face deepened in thought as he folded the message and remarked abstractedly, "She works all right when you are aboard." Then he recalled himself. "Let us try her again without a crew."

Five minutes later we had ascended to the aerial conning-tower, and all was in readiness to repeat the trial of the night before. Vicious and sly the Z99 looked in the daytime as she slipped off, under the unseen guidance of the wireless, with death hidden under her nose. Just as during the first trial we had witnessed, she began by fulfilling the highest expectations. Straight as an arrow she shot out of the harbour's mouth, half submerged, with her periscope sticking up and bearing the flag proudly flapping, leaving behind a wake of white foam.

She turned and re-entered the harbour, obeying Captain Shirley's every whim, twisting in and out of the shipping much to the amazement of the old salts, who had never become used to the weird sight. She cut a figure eight, stopped, started again.

Suddenly I could see by the look on Captain Shirley's face that something was wrong. Before either of us could speak, there was a spurt of water out in the harbour, a cloud of spray, and the Z99 sank in a mass of bubbles. She had heeled over and was resting on the mud and ooze of the harbour bottom. The water had closed over her, and she was gone.

Instantly all the terrible details of the sinking of the Lutin and other submarines flashed over me. I fancied I could see on the Z99 the overturned accumulators. I imagined the stifling fumes, the struggle for breath in the suddenly darkened hull. Almost as if it had happened half an hour ago, I saw it.

"Thank God for telautomatics," I murmured, as the thought swept over me of what we had escaped. "No one was aboard her, at least."

Chlorine was escaping rapidly from the overturned storage batteries, for a grave danger lurks in the presence of sea water, in a submarine, in combination with any of the sulphuric acid. Salt water and sulphuric acid produce chlorine gas, and a pint of it inside a good-sized submarine would be sufficient to render unconscious the crew of a boat. I began to realise the risks we had run, which my confidence in Captain Shirley had minimised. I wondered whether hydrogen in dangerous quantities might not be given off, and with the short-circuiting of the batteries perhaps explode. Nothing more happened, however. All kinds of theories suggested themselves. Perhaps in some way the gasoline motor had been started while the boat was depressed, the "gas" had escaped, combined with air, and a spark had caused an explosion. There were so many possibilities that it staggered me. Captain Shirley sat stunned.

Yet here was the one great question, Whence had come the impulse that had sent the famous Z99 to her fate?

"Could it have been through something internal?' I asked. "Could a current from one of the batteries have influenced the receiving apparatus?"

"No," replied the captain mechanically. "I have a secret method of protecting my receiving instruments from such impulses within the hull."

Kennedy was sitting silently in the corner, oblivious to us up to this point.

"But not to impulses from outside the hull," he broke in.

Unobserved, he had been bending over one of the little instruments which had kept us up all night and bad cost a tedious trip to New York and back.

"What's that?" I asked.

"This? This is a little instrument known as the audion, a wireless electric-wave detector."

"Outside the hull?" repeated Shirley, still dazed.

"Yes," cried Kennedy excitedly. "I got my first clue from that flickering Welsbach mantle last night. Of course it flickered from the wireless we were using, but it kept on. You know in the gas- mantle there is matter in a most mobile and tenuous state, very sensitive to heat and sound vibrations.

"Now, the audion, as you see, consists of two platinum wings, parallel to the plane of a bowed filament of an incandescent light in a vacuum. It was invented by Dr. Lee DeForest to detect wireless. When the light is turned on and the little tantalum filament glows, it is ready for business.

"It can be used for all systems of wireless—singing spark, quenched spark, arc sets, telephone sets; in fact, it will detect a wireless wave from whatever source it is sent. It is so susceptible that a man with one attached to an ordinary steel-rod umbrella on a rainy night can pick up wireless messages that are being transmitted within some hundreds of miles radius."

The audion buzzed.

"There—see? Our wireless is not working. But with the audion you can see that some wireless is, and a fairly near and powerful source it is, too."

Kennedy was absorbed in watching the audion.

Suddenly he turned and faced us. He had evidently reached a conclusion. "Captain," he cried, "can you send a wireless message? Yes? Well, this is to Burke. He is over there back of the hotel on the hill with some of his men. He has one there who understands wireless, and to whom I have given another audion. Quick, before this other wireless cuts in on us again. I want others to get the message as well as Burke. Send this: 'Have your men watch the railroad station and every road to it. Surround the Stamford cottage. There is some wireless interference from that direction.'"

As Shirley, with a half-insane light in his eyes, flashed the message mechanically through space, Craig rose and signalled to the house. Under the portecochere I saw a waiting automobile, which an instant later tore up the broken-stone path and whirled around almost on two wheels near the edge of the cliff. Glowing with health and excitement, Gladys Shirley was at the wheel herself. In spite of the tenseness of the situation, I could not help stopping to admire the change in the graceful, girlish figure of the night before, which was now all lithe energy and alertness in her eager devotion to carrying out the minutest detail of Kennedy's plan to aid her father.

"Excellent, Miss Shirley," exclaimed Kennedy, "but when I asked Burke to have you keep a car in readiness, I had no idea you would drive it yourself."

"I like it," she remonstrated, as he offered to take the wheel. "Please—please—let me drive. I shall go crazy if I'm not doing something. I saw the Z99 go down. What was it? Who—"

"Captain," called Craig. "Quick—into the car. We must hurry. To the Stamford house, Miss Shirley. No one can get away from it before we arrive. It is surrounded."

Everything was quiet, apparently, about the house as our wild ride around the edge of the harbour ended under the deft guidance of Gladys Shirley. Here and there, behind a hedge or tree, I could see a lurking secret-service man. Burke joined us from behind a barn next door.

"Not a soul has gone in or out," he whispered. "There does not seem to be a sign of life there."

Craig and Burke had by this time reached the broad veranda. They did not wait to ring the bell, but carried the door down literally off its hinges. We followed closely.

A scream from the drawing-room brought us to a halt. It was Mrs. Brainard, tall, almost imperial in her loose morning gown, her dark eyes snapping fire at the sudden intrusion. I could not tell whether she had really noticed that the house was watched or was acting a part.

"What does this mean?" she demanded. "What—Gladys—you—"

"Florence—tell them—it isn't so—is it? You don't know a thing about those plans of father's that were—stolen—that night."

"Where is Nordheim?" interjected Burke quickly, a little of his "third degree" training getting the upper hand.

"Nordheim?"

"Yes—you know. Tell me. Is he here?"

"Here? Isn't it bad enough to hound him, without hounding me, too? Will you merciless detectives drive us all from, place to place with your brutal suspicions?"

"Merciless?" inquired Burke, smiling with sarcasm. "Who has been hounding him?"

"You know very well what I mean," she repeated, drawing herself up to her full height and patting Gladys's hand to reassure her. "Read that message on the table."

Burke picked up a yellow telegram dated New York, two days before.

It was as I feared when I left you. The secret service must have rummaged my baggage both here and at the hotel. They have taken some very valuable papers of mine.

"Secret service—rummage baggage?" repeated Burke, himself now in perplexity. "That is news to me. We have rummaged no trunks or bags, least of all Nordheim's. In fact, we have never been able to find them at all."

"Upstairs, Burke—the servants' quarters," interrupted Craig impatiently. "We are wasting time here."

Mrs. Brainard offered no protest. I began to think that the whole thing was indeed a surprise to her, and that she had, in fact, been reading, instead of making a studied effort to appear surprised at our intrusion.

Room after room was flung open without finding any one, until we reached the attic, which had been finished off into several rooms. One door was closed. Craig opened it cautiously. It was pitch dark in spite of the broad daylight outside. We entered gingerly.

On the floor lay two dark piles of something. My foot touched one of them. I drew back in horror at the feeling. It was the body of a man.

Kennedy struck a light, and as he bent over in its little circle of radiance, he disclosed a ghastly scene.

"Hari-kiri!" he ejaculated. "They must have got my message to Burke and have seen that the house was surrounded."

The two Japanese servants had committed suicide.

"Wh-what does it all mean?" gasped Mrs. Brainard, who had followed us upstairs with Gladys.

Burke's lip curled slightly and he was about to speak.

"It means," hastened Kennedy, "that you have been double crossed, Mrs. Brainard. Nordheim stole those plans of Captain Shirley's submarine for his Titan Iron Works. Then the Japs stole them from his baggage at the hotel. He thought the secret service had them. The Japs waited here just long enough to try the plans against the Z99 herself—to destroy Captain Shirley's work by his own method of destruction. It was clever, clever. It would make his labours seem like a failure and would discourage others from keeping up the experiments. They had planned to steal a march on the world. Every time the Z99 was out they worked up here with their improvised wireless until they found the wave-length Shirley was using. It took fifteen or twenty minutes, but they managed, finally, to interfere so that they sent the submarine to the bottom of the harbour. Instead of being the criminal, Burke, Mrs. Brainard is the victim, the victim both of Nordheim and of her servants."

Craig had thrown open a window and had dropped down on his knees before a little stove by which the room was heated. He was poking eagerly in a pile of charred paper and linen.

"Shirley," he cried, "your secret is safe, even though the duplicate plans were stolen. There will be no more interference."

The Captain seized Craig by both hands and wrung them like the handle of a pump.

"Oh, thank you—thank you—thank you," cried Gladys, running up and almost dancing with joy at the change in her father. "I—I could almost—kiss you!"

"I could let you," twinkled Craig, promptly, as she blushed deeply. "Thank you, too, Mrs. Brainard," he added, turning to acknowledge her congratulations also. "I am glad I have been able to be of service to you."

"Won't you come back to the house for dinner?" urged the Captain.

Kennedy looked at me and smiled. "Walter," he said, "this is no place for two old bachelors like us."

Then turning, he added, "Many thanks, sir,—but, seriously, last night we slept principally in day coaches. Really I must turn the case over to Burke now and get back to the city to-night early."

They insisted on accompanying us to the station, and there the congratulations were done all over again.

"Why," exclaimed Kennedy, as we settled ourselves in the Pullman after waving a final good-bye, "I shall be afraid to go back to that town again. I—I almost did kiss her!"

Then his face settled into its usual stern lines, although softened, I thought. I am sure that it was not the New England landscape, with its quaint stone fences, that he looked at out of the window, but the recollection of the bright dashing figure of Gladys Shirley.

It was seldom that a girl made so forcible an impression on Kennedy, I know, for on our return he fairly dived into work, like the Z99 herself, and I did not see him all the next day until just before dinner time. Then he came in and spent half an hour restoring his acid-stained fingers to something like human semblance.

He said nothing about his research work of the day, and I was just about to remark that a day had passed without its usual fresh alarum and excursion, when a tap on the door buzzer was followed by the entrance of our old friend Andrews, head of the Great Eastern Life Insurance Company's own detective service.

"Kennedy," he began, "I have a startling case for you. Can you help me out with it?"

As he sat down heavily, he pulled from his immense black wallet some scraps of paper and newspaper cuttings.

"You recall, I suppose," he went on, unfolding the papers without waiting for an answer, "the recent death of young Montague Phelps, at Woodbine, just outside the city?"

Kennedy nodded. The death of Phelps, about ten days before, had attracted nation-wide attention because of the heroic fight for life he had made against what the doctors admitted had puzzled them—a new and baffling manifestation of coma. They had laboured hard to keep him awake, but had not succeeded, and after several days of lying in a comatose state he had finally succumbed. It was one of those strange but rather frequent cases of long sleeps reported in the newspapers, although it was by no means one which might be classed as record-breaking.

The interest in Phelps lay, a great deal, in the fact that the young man had married the popular dancer, Anginette Petrovska, a few months previously. His honeymoon trip around the world had suddenly been interrupted, while the couple were crossing Siberia, by the news of the failure of the Phelps banking-house in Wall Street and the practical wiping-out of his fortune. He had returned, only to fall a victim to a greater misfortune.

"A few days before his death," continued Andrews, measuring his words carefully, "I, or rather the Great Eastern, which had been secretly investigating the case, received this letter. What do you think of it?"

He spread out on the table a crumpled note in a palpably disguised handwriting:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

You would do well to look Into the death of Montague Phelps, Jr. I accuse no one, assert nothing. But when a young man apparently in the best of health, drops off so mysteriously and even the physician in the case can give no very convincing information, that case warrants attention. I know what I know.

AN OUTSIDER.



XXI

THE GHOULS

"H-M," mused Kennedy, weighing the contents of the note carefully, "one of the family, I'll be bound—unless the whole thing is a hoax. By the way, who else is there in the immediate family?"

"Only a brother, Dana Phelps, younger and somewhat inclined to wildness, I believe. At least, his father did not trust him with a large inheritance, but left most of his money in trust. But before we go any further, read that."

Andrews pulled from the papers a newspaper cutting on which he had drawn a circle about the following item. As we read, he eyed us sharply.

PHELPS TOMB DESECRATED

Last night, John Shaughnessy, a night watchman employed by the town of Woodbine, while on his rounds, was attracted by noises as of a violent struggle near the back road in the Woodbine Cemetery, on the outskirts of the town. He had varied his regular rounds because of the recent depredations of motor-car yeggmen who had timed him in pulling off several jobs lately. As he hurried toward the large mausoleum of the Phelps family, he saw two figures slink away in opposite directions in the darkness. One of them, he asserts positively, seemed to be a woman in black, the other a man whom he could not see clearly. They readily eluded pursuit in the shadows, and a moment later he heard the whir of a high-powered car, apparently bearing them away.

At the tomb there was every evidence of a struggle. Things had been thrown about; the casket had been broken open, but the body of Montague Phelps, Jr., which had been interred there about ten days ago, was not touched or mutilated.

It was a shocking and extraordinary violation. Shaughnessy believes that some personal jewels may have been buried with Phelps and that the thieves were after them, that they fought over the loot, and in the midst of the fight were scared away.

The vault is of peculiar construction, a costly tomb in which repose the bodies of the late Montague Phelps, Sr., of his wife, and now of his eldest son. The raid had evidently been carefully planned to coincide with a time when Shaughnessy would ordinarily have been on the other side of the town. The entrance to the tomb had been barred, but during the commotion the ghouls were surprised and managed to escape without accomplishing their object and leaving no trace.

Mrs. Phelps, when informed of the vandalism, was shocked, and has been in a very nervous state since the tomb was forced open. The local authorities seem extremely anxious that every precaution should be taken to prevent a repetition of the ghoulish visit to the tomb, but as yet the Phelps family has taken no steps.

"Are you aware of any scandal, any skeleton in the closet in the family?" asked Craig, looking up.

"No—not yet," considered Andrews. "As soon as I heard of the vandalism, I began to wonder what could have happened in the Phelps tomb, as far as our company's interests were concerned. You see, that was yesterday. To-day this letter came along," he added, laying down a second very dirty and wrinkled note beside the first. It was quite patently written by a different person from the first; its purport was different, indeed quite the opposite of the other. "It was sent to Mrs. Phelps," explained Andrews, "and she gave it out herself to the police."

Do not show this to the police. Unless you leave $5000 in gold in the old stump in the swamp across from the cemetery, you will have reason to regret it. If you respect the memory of the dead, do this, and do it quietly.

BLACK HAND.

"Well," I ejaculated, "that's cool. What threat would be used to back this demand on the Phelpses?"

"Here's the situation," resumed Andrews, puffing violently on his inevitable cigar and toying with the letters and clippings. "We have already held up payment of the half-million dollars of insurance to the widow as long as we can consistently do so. But we must pay soon, scandal or not, unless we can get something more than mere conjecture."

"You are already holding it up?" queried Craig.

"Yes. You see, we investigate thoroughly every suspicious death. In most cases, no body is found. This case is different in that respect. There is a body, and it is the body of the insured, apparently. But a death like this, involving the least mystery, receives careful examination, especially if, as in this case, it has recently been covered by heavy policies. My work has often served to reverse the decision of doctors and coroners' juries.

"An insurance detective, as you can readily appreciate, Kennedy, soon comes to recognise the characteristics in the crimes with which he deals. For example, writing of the insurance plotted for rarely precedes the conspiracy to defraud. That is, I know of few cases in which a policy originally taken out in good faith has subsequently become the means of a swindle.

"In outright-murder cases, the assassin induces the victim to take out insurance in his favour. In suicide cases, the insured does so himself. Just after his return home, young Phelps, who carried fifty thousand dollars already, applied for and was granted one of the largest policies we have ever written—half a million."

"Was it incontestible without the suicide clause?" asked Kennedy.

"Yes," replied Andrews, "and suicide is the first and easiest theory. Why, you have no idea how common the crime of suicide for the sake of the life insurance is becoming. Nowadays, we insurance men almost believe that every one who contemplates ending his existence takes out a policy so as to make his life, which is useless to him, a benefit, at least, to some one—and a nightmare to the insurance detective."

"I know," I cut in, for I recalled having been rather interested in the Phelps case at the time, "but I thought the doctors said finally that death was due to heart failure."

"Doctor Forden who signed the papers said so," corrected Andrews. "Heart failure—what does that mean? As well say breath failure, or nerve failure. I'll tell you what kind of failure I think it was. It was money failure. Hard times and poor investments struck Phelps before he really knew how to handle his small fortune. It called him home and—pouf!—he is off—to leave to his family a cool half-million by his death. But did he do it himself or did some one else do it? That's the question."