“Oh, yes, I would.”
“No, stay where you are. Unless I attend to it the diamonds might be ruined.”
There was something peculiar about his insistence, but after he picked out the next diamond I was hardly prepared for Kennedy’s next remark.
“Let me see the palms of your hands.”
Poissan shot an angry glance at Kennedy, but he did not open his hands.
“I merely wish to convince you, ‘Mr. Spencer,’” said Kennedy to me, “that it is no sleight-of-hand trick and that the professor has not several uncut stones palmed in his hand like a prestidigitator.”
The Frenchman faced us, his face livid with rage. “You call me a prestidigitator, a fraud—you shall suffer for that! Sacrebleu! Ventre du Saint Gris! No man ever insults the honour of Poissan. Francois, water on the electrodes!”
The assistant dashed a few drops of water on the electrodes. The sickish odour increased tremendously. I felt myself almost going, but with an effort I again roused myself. I wondered how Craig stood the fumes, for I suffered an intense headache and nausea.
“Stop!” Craig thundered. “There’s enough cyanogen in this room already. I know your game—the water forms acetylene with the carbon, and that uniting with the nitrogen of the air under the terrific heat of the electric arc forms hydrocyanic acid. Would you poison us, too? Do you think you can put me unconscious out on the street and have a society doctor diagnose my case as pneumonia? Or do you think we shall die quietly in some hospital as a certain New York banker did last year after he had watched an alchemist make silver out of apparently nothing!”
The effect on Poissan was terrible. He advanced toward Kennedy, the veins in his face fairly standing out. Shaking his forefinger, he shouted: “You know that, do you? You are no professor, and this is no banker. You are spies, spies. You come from the friends of Morowitch, do you? You have gone too far with me.”
Kennedy said nothing, but retreated and took his coat and hat off the window ledge. The hideous penetrating light of the tongues of flame from the furnace played on the ground-glass window.
Poissan laughed a hollow laugh.
“Put down your hat and coat, Mistair Kennedy,” he hissed. “The door has been locked ever since you have been here. Those windows are barred, the telephone wire is cut, and it is three hundred feet to the street. We shall leave you here when the fumes have overcome you. Francois and I can stand them up to a point, and when we reach that point we are going.”
Instead of being cowed Kennedy grew bolder, though I, for my part, felt so weakened that I feared the outcome of a hand-to-hand encounter with either Poissan or Francois, who appeared as fresh as if nothing had happened. They were hurriedly preparing to leave us.
“That would do you no good,” Kennedy rejoined, “for we have no safe full of jewels for you to rob. There are no keys to offices to be stolen from our pockets. And let me tell you—you are not the only man in New York who knows the secret of thermite. I have told the secret to the police, and they are only waiting to find who destroyed Morowitch’s correspondence under the letter ‘P’ to apprehend the robber of his safe. Your secret is out.”
“Revenge! revenge!” Poissan cried. “I will have revenge. Francois, bring out the jewels—ha! ha!—here in this bag are the jewels of Mr. Morowitch. Tonight Francois and I will go down by the back elevator to a secret exit. In two hours all your police in New York cannot find us. But in two hours you two impostors will be suffocated—perhaps you will die of cyanogen, like Morowitch, whose jewels I have at last.”
He went to the door into the hall and stood there with a mocking laugh. I moved to make a rush toward them, but Kennedy raised his hand.
“You will suffocate,” Poissan hissed again.
Just then we heard the elevator door clang, and hurried steps came down the long hall.
Craig whipped out his automatic and began pumping the bullets out in rapid succession. As the smoke cleared I expected to see Poissan and Francois lying on the floor. Instead, Craig had fired at the lock of the door. He had shattered it into a thousand bits. Andrews and his men were running down the hall.
“Curse you!” muttered Poissan as he banged the now useless lock, “who let those fellows in? Are you a wizard?”
Craig smiled coolly as the ventilation cleared the room of the deadly cyanogen.
“On the window-sill outside is a selenium cell. Selenium is a bad conductor of electricity in the dark, and an excellent conductor when exposed to light. I merely moved my coat and hat, and the light from the furnace which was going to suffocate us played through the glass on the cell, the circuit was completed without your suspecting that I could communicate with friends outside, a bell was rung on the street, and here they are. Andrews, there is the murderer of Morowitch, and there in his hands are the Morowitch—”
Poissan had moved toward the furnace. With a quick motion he seized the long tongs. There was a cloud of choking vapour. Kennedy leaped to the switch and shut off the current. With the tongs he lifted out a shapeless piece of valueless black graphite.
“All that is left of the priceless Morowitch jewels,” he exclaimed ruefully. “But we have the murderer.”
“And tomorrow a certified check for one hundred thousand dollars goes to Mrs. Morowitch with my humblest apologies and sympathy,” added Andrews. “Professor Kennedy, you have earned your retainer.”
VII. THE AZURE RING
Files of newspapers and innumerable clippings from the press bureaus littered Kennedy’s desk in rank profusion. Kennedy himself was so deeply absorbed that I had merely said good evening as I came in and had started to open my mail. With an impatient sweep of his hand, however, he brushed the whole mass of newspapers into the waste-basket.
“It seems to me, Walter,” he exclaimed in disgust, “that this mystery is considered insoluble for the very reason which should make it easy to solve—the extraordinary character of its features.”
Inasmuch as he had opened the subject, I laid down the letter I was reading. “I’ll wager I can tell you just why you made that remark, Craig,” I ventured. “You’re reading up on that Wainwright-Templeton affair.”
“You are on the road to becoming a detective yourself, Walter,” he answered with a touch of sarcasm. “Your ability to add two units to two other units and obtain four units is almost worthy of Inspector O’Connor. You are right and within a quarter of an hour the district attorney of Westchester County will be here. He telephoned me this afternoon and sent an assistant with this mass of dope. I suppose he’ll want it back,” he added, fishing the newspapers out of the basket again. “But, with all due respect to your profession, I’ll say that no one would ever get on speaking terms with the solution of this case if he had to depend solely on the newspaper writers.”
“No?” I queried, rather nettled at his tone.
“No,” he repeated emphatically. “Here one of the most popular girls in the fashionable suburb of Williston, and one of the leading younger members of the bar in New York, engaged to be married, are found dead in the library of the girl’s home the day before the ceremony. And now, a week later, no one knows whether it was an accident due to the fumes from the antique charcoal-brazier, or whether it was a double suicide, or suicide and murder, or a double murder, or—or—why, the experts haven’t even been able to agree on whether they have discovered poison or not,” he continued, growing as excited as the city editor did over my first attempt as a cub reporter.
“They haven’t agreed on anything except that on the eve of what was, presumably, to have been the happiest day of their lives two of the best known members of the younger set are found dead, while absolutely no one, as far as is known, can be proved to have been near them within the time necessary to murder them. No wonder the coroner says it is simply