The Social Gangster Part 48

A private ambulance was called and, with much wagging of heads and tongues, the body of Leon was carried on a stretcher, covered by a sheet, down the gangplank and placed in it. We followed closely in a taxicab, across the bridge and uptown.

For some days, I may say, Kennedy had been at work in his laboratory in a little anteroom, where he was installing some new apparatus for which he had received an appropriation from the trustees of the University.

It was a very complicated affair, one part of which seemed to be a veritable room within the room. Into this chamber, as it were, he now directed the men to carry Leon's body and lay it on a sort of bed or pallet that was let down from the side wall of the compartment.

I had been quite mystified by the apparatus which Kennedy had set up, but had had no opportunity to discuss it with him and he had been so busy installing it that he had not taken time, often, for meals. In fact, the only way I knew that he had finished was that when Burke had called he had seemed interested in the call.

Outside the small chamber I have spoken of, in the room itself, were several large pieces of machinery, huge cylinders with wheels and belts, run by electric motors. No sooner had the body been placed in the little chamber and the door carefully closed than Kennedy threw a switch, setting the apparatus in motion.

"How could Leon have been killed?" I asked, as he rejoined me in the outside laboratory. "What did Collette mean by her frightened cry of the 'voodoo sign'?"

The incident had made a marked impression on me and I had been unable quite to arrive at any sensible explanation.

"Of course, you know that voodoo means literally anything that inspires fear," remarked Kennedy after a moment's thought. "The G.o.d of voodoo is the snake. I cannot say now what it was that she feared. But to see the eyeb.a.l.l.s turn green is uncanny, isn't it?"

"I should say so," I agreed. "But is that all?"

He shook his head. "No, I don't believe it is. Hayti is the hotbed of voodoo wors.h.i.+p. The cult has inaugurated a sort of priesthood--often a priest and a priestess, called 'papaloi' and 'mammaloi'--papa and mamma, probably with a corruption of the French word, 'roi,' king. They are, as it were, heads of the community, father and mother, king and queen. Some of the leading men of the communities in the islands of the Caribbean are secret voodoists and leaders. Just what is going on under the surface in this case, I cannot even hazard a guess. But there is some deviltry afoot."

Just then the telephone rang and Craig answered it.

"It was from Burke," he said as he hung up the receiver. "Confidential agents of his have been about. No one from the s.h.i.+p seems to have been down to see Forsythe, but Forsythe has had people over at the s.h.i.+p.

Burke says someone is sending off great bunches of messages to Hayti--he thinks the powerful wireless apparatus of the _Haytien_ is being used."

For a moment Kennedy stood in the center of the laboratory, thinking.

Then he appeared to make up his mind to something.

"Has that taxicab gone?" he asked, opening a cabinet from which he took several packages.

I looked out of the window. The ambulance had gone back, but the driver of the car had evidently waited to call up his office for instructions.

I beckoned to him, and together Kennedy and I placed the packages in the car.

Thus we were able quickly to get back again to the wharf where the _Haytien_ was berthed. Instead of going aboard again, however, Kennedy stopped just outside, where he was not observed and got out of the car, dismissing it.

In the office of the steams.h.i.+p company, he sought one of the employes and handed him a card, explaining that we were aiding Burke in the case.

The result of the parley was that Kennedy succeeded in getting to the roof of the covered pier on the opposite side from that where the s.h.i.+p lay.

There he set to work on a strange apparatus, wires from which ran up to a flag pole on which he was constructing what looked like a hastily improvised wireless aerial. That part arranged, Kennedy followed his wires down again and took them in by a window to a sort of lumber-room back of the office. Outside everyone was too busy to watch what we were doing there and Craig could work uninterrupted.

"What are you doing?" I asked. "Installing a wireless plant?"

"Not quite," he smiled quietly. "This is a home-made wireless photo-recording set. Of course, wireless aerials of amateurs don't hum any more since war has caused the strict censors.h.i.+p of all wireless. But there is no reason why one can't receive messages, even if they can't be sent by everybody.

"This is a fairly easy and inexpensive means by which automatic records can be taken. It involves no delicate instruments and the princ.i.p.al part of it can be made in a few hours from materials that I have in my laboratory. The basis is the capillary electrometer."

"Sounds very simple," I volunteered, trying not to be sarcastic.

"Well, here it is," he indicated, touching what looked like an ordinary soft gla.s.s tube of perhaps a quarter of an inch diameter, bent U-shaped, with one limb shorter than the other.

"It is filled nearly to the top of the shorter limb with chemically pure mercury," he went on. "On the top of it, I have poured a little twenty per cent sulphuric acid. Dipping into the acid is a small piece of capillary tube drawn out to a very fine point at the lower end."

He filled the little tube with mercury also. "The point of this," he observed, "is fine enough to prevent the mercury running through of its own weight--about as fine as a hair."

He dipped the point and held it in the sulphuric acid and blew through the capillary tube. When the mercury bubbled through the point in minute drops, he stopped blowing. It drew back for a short distance by capillary attraction and the acid followed it up.

"You can see that connections are made to the mercury in the arm and the tube by short pieces of platinum wire," he continued. "It isn't necessary to go into the theory of the instrument. But the most minute difference of potential between the two ma.s.ses of mercury will cause the fine point at the junction of the liquids to move up and down.

"Connected to the aerial and the earth, with a crystal detector in series, it is only a matter of applying an ordinary photo-recording drum, and the machine is made."

He had been setting up a light-tight box, inside of which was a little electric lamp. Opposite was a drum covered with bromide paper. He started the clockwork going and after a few moments' careful observation, we went away, and left the thing, trusting that no one was the wiser.

Nothing further occurred that day, except for frequent reports from Burke, who told us how his men were getting on in their shadowing of Forsythe & Co. Apparently, the death of Leon had put a stop to revolutionary plots, or at least had caused the plotters to change their methods radically.

The time was shortening, too, during which Burke could keep the pa.s.sengers of the _Haytien_ under such close surveillance, and it was finally decided that on the next morning they should be released, while all those suspected were to be shadowed separately by Secret Service agents, in the hope that once free they would commit some overt act that might lead to a clew.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE RESPIRATION CALORIMETER

It was early the next morning, about half an hour after the time set for the release of the pa.s.sengers, that our laboratory door was flung open and Collette Aux Cayes rushed in, wildly excited.

"What's the matter?" asked Kennedy anxiously.

"Someone has been trying to keep me on the boat," she panted. "And all the way over here a man has been following me."

Kennedy looked at her a minute calmly. We could understand why she might have been shadowed, though it must have been a bungling job of Burke's operative. But who could have wanted her kept on the boat?

"I don't know," she replied, in answer to Kennedy's question. "But somehow I was the only one not told that we could go. And when I did go, one of the Secret Service men stopped me."

"Are you sure it was a Secret Service man?"

"He said he was."

"Yes, but if he had been, he would not have done that, nor let you get away, if he had. Can't you imagine anyone who might want you detained longer?"

She looked at us, half frightened. "N--not unless it is that man--or the woman with him," she replied, clasping her hands.

"You mean Castine?"

"Yes," she replied, avoiding the use of his name. "Ever since you had the body removed, he has been in great fear. I have heard him ask fifty times, 'Where have they taken him?' and 'Is he to be embalmed?'"

"That's strange," remarked Kennedy. "Why that anxiety from him? I remember that it was he who wanted the body left alone. Is it for fear that we might discover something which might be covered up?"

Kennedy disappeared into the anteroom and I heard him making a great fuss as he regulated the various pieces of machinery that surrounded the little chamber.