“Oh, save him!” she cried. “Can’t anything be done to save my father in spite of himself?”
“It is too late,” mocked Mrs. Labret. “People will read the account of the robbery in the papers, even if it didn’t take place. They will see it before they see a denial. Orders will flood in to sell the stock. No; it can’t be stopped.”
Kennedy glanced momentarily at me.
“Is there still time to catch the last morning edition of the Star, Walter?” he asked, quietly. I glanced at my watch.
“We may try. It’s possible.”
“Write a despatch—an accident to the engine—train delayed—now proceeding—anything. Here, Dugan, you keep them covered. Shoot to kill if there’s a move.”
Kennedy had begun feverishly setting up the part of the apparatus which he had brought after Whiting had set up his.
“What can you do?” hissed Mrs. Labret. “You can’t get word through. Orders have been issued that the telegraph operators are under no circumstances to give out news about this train. The wireless is out of commission, too—the operator overcome. The robbery story has been prepared and given out by this time. Already reporters are being assigned to follow it up.”
I looked over at Kennedy. If orders had been given for such secrecy by Barry Euston, how could my despatch do any good? It would be held back by the operators.
Craig quickly slung a wire over those by the side of the track and seized what I had written, sending furiously.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “You heard what she said.”
“One thing you can be certain of,” he answered, “that despatch can never be stolen or tapped by spies.”
“Why—what is this?” I asked, pointing to the instrument.
“The invention of Major Squier, of the army,” he replied, “by which any number of messages may be sent at the same time over the same wire without the slightest conflict. Really it consists in making wireless electric waves travel along, instead of inside, the wire. In other words, he had discovered the means of concentrating the energy of a wireless wave on a given point instead of letting it riot all over the face of the earth.
“It is the principle of wireless. But in ordinary wireless less than one-millionth part of the original sending force reaches the point for which it is intended. The rest is scattered through space in all directions. If the vibrations of a current are of a certain number per second, the current will follow a wire to which it is, as it were, attached, instead of passing off into space.
“All the energy in wireless formerly wasted in radiation in every direction now devotes itself solely to driving the current through the ether about the wire. Thus it goes until it reaches the point where Whiting is—where the vibrations correspond to its own and are in tune. There it reproduces the sending impulse. It is wired wireless.”
Craig had long since finished sending his wired wireless message. We waited impatiently. The seconds seemed to drag like hours.
Far off, now, we could hear a whistle as a train finally approached slowly into our block, creeping up to see what was wrong. But that made no difference now. It was not any help they could give us that we wanted. A greater problem, the saving of one man’s name and the re-establishment of another, confronted us.
Unexpectedly the little wired wireless instrument before us began to buzz. Quickly Kennedy seized a pencil and wrote as the message that no hand of man could interfere with was flashed back to us.
“It is for you, Walter, from the Star,” he said, simply handing me what he had written on the back of an old envelope.
I read, almost afraid to read:
Robbery story killed. Black type across page-head last edition, “Treasure-train safe!” McGRATH.
“Show it to Miss Euston,” Craig added, simply, gathering up his wired wireless set, just as the crew from the train behind us ran up. “She may like to know that she has saved her father fromhimself through misunderstanding her lover.”
I thought Maude Euston would faint as she clutched the message. Lane caught her as she reeled backward.
“Rodman—can you—forgive me?” she murmured, simply, yielding to him and looking up into his face.
CHAPTER II
THE TRUTH DETECTOR
“You haven’t heard—no one outside has heard—of the strange illness and the robbery of my employer, Mr. Mansfield—‘Diamond Jack’ Mansfield, you know.”
Our visitor was a slight, very pretty, but extremely nervous girl, who had given us a card bearing the name Miss Helen Grey.
“Illness—robbery?” repeated Kennedy, at once interested and turning a quick glance at me.
I shrugged my shoulders in the negative. Neither the Star nor any of the other papers had had a word about it.
“Why, what’s the trouble?” he continued to Miss Grey.
“You see,” she explained, hurrying on, “I’m Mr. Mansfield’s private secretary, and—oh, Professor Kennedy, I don’t know, but I’m afraid it is a case for a detective rather than a doctor.” She paused a moment and leaned forward nearer to us. “I think he has been poisoned!”
The words themselves were startling enough without the evident perturbation of the girl. Whatever one might think, there was no doubt that she firmly believed what she professed to fear. More than that, I fancied I detected a deeper feeling in her tone than merely loyalty to her employer.
“Diamond Jack” Mansfield was known in Wall Street as a successful promoter, on the White Way as an assiduous first-nighter, in the sporting fraternity as a keen plunger. But of all his hobbies, none had gained him more notoriety than his veritable passion for collecting diamonds.
He came by his sobriquet honestly. I remembered once having seen him, and he was, in fact, a walking De Beers mine. For his personal adornment, more than a million dollars’ worth of gems did relay duty. He had scores of sets, every one of them fit for a king of diamonds. It was a curious hobby for a great, strong man, yet he was not alone in his love of and sheer affection for things beautiful. Not love of display or desire to attract notice to himself had prompted him to collect diamonds, but the mere pleasure of owning them, of associating with them. It was a hobby.
It was not strange, therefore, to suspect that Mansfield might, after all, have been the victim of some kind of attack. He went about with perfect freedom, in spite of the knowledge that crooks must have possessed about his hoard.
“What makes you think he has been poisoned?” asked Kennedy, betraying no show of doubt that Miss Grey might be right.
“Oh, it’s so strange, so sudden!” she murmured.
“But how do you think it could have happened?” he persisted.
“It must have been at the little supper-party he gave at his apartment last night,” she answered, thoughtfully, then added, more slowly, “and yet, it was not until this morning, eight or ten hours after the party, that he became ill.” She shuddered. “Paroxysms of nausea, followed by stupor and such terrible prostration. His valet discovered him and sent for Doctor Murray— and then for me.”
“How about the robbery?” prompted Kennedy, as it became evident that it was Mansfield’s physical condition more than anything else that was on Miss Grey’s mind.
“Oh yes”—she recalled herself—“I suppose you know something of his gems? Most people do.” Kennedy nodded. “He usually keeps them in a safe-deposit vault downtown, from which he will get whatever set he feels like wearing. Last night it was the one he calls his sporting-set that he wore, by far the finest. It cost over a hundred thousand dollars, and is one of the most curious of all the studies in personal adornment that