“This terrible place! How can I ever thank you for getting me out of it?”
Kennedy did not pause long enough to say a word, but hurried her across to the final barrier, the wall.
Suddenly there was a shout of alarm from the front of the house under the columns. It was the night watchman, who had discovered us.
Instantly Kennedy seized a chair from a little summer-house.
“Quick, Walter,” he cried, “over the wall with Mrs. Cranston, while I hold him! Then throw the ladder back on this side. I’ll join you in a moment, as soon as you get her safely over.”
A chair is only an indifferent club, if that is all one can think of using it for. Kennedy ran squarely at the watchman, holding it out straight before him. Only once did I cast a hasty glance back. There was the man pinned to the wall by the chair, with Kennedy at the other end of it and safely out of reach.
Mrs. Cranston and I managed to scramble over the wall, although she tore her dress on the pickets before we reached the other side. I hustled her into the car and made everything ready to start. It was only a couple of minutes after I threw the ladder back before Craig rejoined us.
“How did you get away from the watchman?” I demanded, breathlessly, as we shot away.
“I forced him back with the chair into the hall and slammed the door. Then I jammed a wedge under it,” he chuckled. “That will hold it better than any lock. Every push will jam it tighter.”
Above the hubbub, inside now, we could hear a loud gong sounding insistently. All about were lights flashing up at the windows and moving through the passageways. Shouts came from the back of the house as a door was finally opened there. But we were off now, with a good start.
I could imagine the frantic telephoning that was going on in the sanatorium. And I knew that the local police of Montrose and every other town about us were being informed of the escape. They were required by the law to render all possible assistance, and, as the country boasted several institutions quite on a par with Belleclaire, an attempt at an escape was not an unusual occurrence.
The post-road by which we had come was therefore impossible, and Kennedy swung up into the country, in the hope of throwing off pursuit long enough to give us a better chance.
“Take the wheel, Walter,” he muttered. “I’ll tell you what turns to make. We must get to the State line of New York without being stopped. We can beat almost any car. But that is not enough. A telephone message ahead may stop us, unless we can keep from being seen.”
I took the wheel, and did not stop the car as Kennedy climbed over the seat. In the back of the car, where Mrs. Cranston was sitting, he hastily adjusted the peculiar apparatus.
“Sounds at night are very hard to locate,” he explained. “Up this side road, Walter; there is some one coming ahead of us.”
I turned and shot up the detour, stopping in the shadow of some trees, where we switched off every light and shut down the engine. Kennedy continued to watch the instrument before him.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“A phonometer,” he replied. “It was invented to measure the intensity of sound. But it is much more valuable as an instrument that tells with precision from what direction a sound comes. It needs only a small dry battery and can be carried around easily. The sound enters the two horns of the phonometer, is focused at the neck, and strikes on a delicate diaphragm, behind which is a needle. The diaphragm vibrates and the needle moves. The louder the sound the greater the movement of this needle.
“At this end, where it looks as though I were sighting like a surveyor, I am gazing into a lens, with a tiny electric bulb close to my eye. The light of this bulb is reflected in a mirror which is moved by the moving needle. When the sound is loudest the two horns are at right angles to the direction whence it comes. So it is only necessary to twist the phonometer about on its pivot until the sound is received most loudly in the horns and the band of light is greatest. I know then that the horns are at right angles to the direction from which the sound proceeds, and that, as I lift my head, I am looking straight toward the source of the sound. I can tell its direction to a few degrees.”
I looked through it myself to see how sound was visualized by light.
“Hush!” cautioned Kennedy.
Down on the main road we could see a car pass along slowly in the direction of Montrose, from which we had come. Without the phonometer to warn us, it must inevitably have met us and blocked our escape over the road ahead.
That danger passed, on we sped. Five minutes, I calculated, and we should cross the State line to New York and safety.
We had been going along nicely when, “Bang!” came a loud report back of us.
“Confound it!” muttered Kennedy; “a blowout always when you least expect it.”
We climbed out of the car and had the shoe off in short order.
“Look!” cried Janet Cranston, in a frightened voice, from the back of the car.
The light of the phonometer had flashed up. A car was following us.
“There’s just one chance!” cried Kennedy, springing to the wheel. “We might make it on the rim.”
Banging and pounding, we forged ahead, straining our eyes to watch the road, the distance, the time, and the phonometer all at once.
It was no use. A big gray roadster was overtaking us. The driver crowded us over to the very edge of the road, then shot ahead, and, where the road narrowed down, deliberately pulled up across the road in such a way that we had to run into him or stop.
Quickly Craig’s automatic gleamed in the dim beams from the side lights.
“Just a minute,” cautioned a voice. “It was a plot against me, quite as much as it was against her—the nurse to lead me on, while the doctor got a rich patient. I suspected all was not right. That’s why I gave you the card. I knew you didn’t come from Burr. Then, when I heard nothing from you, I let the Giles woman think I was coming to Montrose to be with her. But, really, I wanted to beat that fake asylum—”
Two piercing headlights shone down the road back of us. We waited a moment until they, too, came to a stop.
“Here they are!” shouted the voice of a man, as he jumped out, followed by a woman.
Kennedy stepped forward, waving his automatic menacingly.
“You are under arrest for conspiracy—both of you!” he cried, as we recognized Doctor Burr and Miss Giles.
A little cry behind me startled me, and I turned. Janet Cranston had flung herself into the arms of the only person who could heal her wounded soul.
CHAPTER IV
THE MYSTIC POISONER
“It’s almost as though he had been struck down by a spirit hand, Kennedy.”
Grady, the house detective of the Prince Edward Charles Hotel, had routed us out of bed in the middle of the night with a hurried call for help, and now met us in the lobby of the fashionable hostelry. All that he had said over the wire was that there had been a murder—“an Englishman, a Captain Shirley.”
“Why,” exclaimed Grady, lowering his voice as he led us through the lobby, “it’s the most mysterious thing, I think, that I’ve ever seen!”
“In what way?” prompted Kennedy.
“Well,” continued Grady, “it must have been just a bit after midnight that one