It was late, yet we sat for nearly an hour longer, and I don’t think we exchanged a half-dozen sentences in all that time. Craig seemed absorbed in thought. At length, as the great hall-clock sounded midnight, we rose as if by common consent.
“Tom,” said Craig, and I could feel the sympathy that welled up in his voice, “Tom, old man, I’ll get at the bottom of this mystery if human intelligence can do it.”
“I know you will, Craig,” responded Tom, grasping each of us by the hand. “That’s why I so much wanted you fellows to come up here.”
Early in the morning Kennedy aroused me. “Now, Walter, I’m going to ask you to come down into the living-room with me, and we’ll take a look at it in the daytime.”
I hurried into my clothes, and together we quietly went down. Starting with the exact spot where the unfortunate man had been discovered, Kennedy began a minute examination of the floor, using his pocket lens. Every few moments he would stop to examine a spot on the rug or on the hardwood floor more intently. Several times I saw him scrape up something with the blade of his knife and carefully preserve the scrapings, each in a separate piece of paper.
Sitting idly by, I could not for the life of me see just what good it did for me to be there, and I said as much. Kennedy laughed quietly.
“You’re a material witness, Walter,” he replied. “Perhaps I shall need you some day to testify that I actually found these spots in this room.”
Just then Tom stuck his head in. “Can I help?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going at it so early?”
“No, thanks,” answered Craig, rising from the floor. “I was just making a careful examination of the room before anyone was up so that nobody would think I was too interested. I’ve finished. But you can help me, after all. Do you think you could describe exactly how everyone was dressed that night?”
“Why, I can try. Let me see. To begin with, uncle had on a shooting-jacket—that was pretty well burnt, as you know. Why, in fact, we all had our shooting-jackets on. The ladies were in white.”
Craig pondered a little, but did not seem disposed to pursue the subject further, until Tom volunteered the information that since the tragedy none of them had been wearing their shooting jackets.
“We’ve all been wearing city clothes,” he remarked.
“Could you get your Uncle James and your Cousin Junior to go with you for an hour or two this morning on the lake, or on a tramp in the woods?” asked Craig after a moment’s thought.
“Really, Craig,” responded Tom doubtfully, “I ought to go to Saranac to complete the arrangements for taking Uncle Lewis’s body to New York.”
“Very well, persuade them to go with you. Anything, so long as you keep me from interruption for an hour or two.”
They agreed on doing that, and as by that time most of the family were up, we went in to breakfast, another silent and suspicious meal.
After breakfast Kennedy tactfully withdrew from the family, and I did the same. We wandered off in the direction of the stables and there fell to admiring some of the horses. The groom, who seemed to be a sensible and pleasant sort of fellow, was quite ready to talk, and soon he and Craig were deep in discussing the game of the north country.
“Many rabbits about here?” asked Kennedy at length, when they had exhausted the larger game.
“Oh, yes. I saw one this morning, sir,” replied the groom.
“Indeed?” said Kennedy. “Do you suppose you could catch a couple for me?”
“Guess I could, sir—alive, you mean?”
“Oh, yes, alive—I don’t want you to violate the game laws. This is the closed season, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, but then it’s all right, sir, here on the estate.”
“Bring them to me this afternoon, or—no, keep them here in the stable in a cage and let me know when you have them. If anybody asks you about them, say they belong to Mr. Tom.”
Craig handed a small treasury note to the groom, who took it with a grin and touched his hat.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I have the bunnies.”
As we walked slowly back from the stables we caught sight of Tom down at the boat-house just putting off in the motor-boat with his uncle and cousin. Craig waved to him, and he walked up to meet us.
“While you’re in Saranac,” said Craig, “buy me a dozen or so test-tubes. Only, don’t let anyone here at the house know you are buying them. They might ask questions.”
While they were gone Kennedy stole into James Langley’s room and after a few minutes returned to our room with the hunting-jacket. He carefully examined it with his pocket lens. Then he filled a drinking-glass with warm boiled water and added a few pinches of table salt. With a piece of sterilised gauze from Doctor Putnam’s medicine-chest, he carefully washed off a few portions of the coat and set the glass and the gauze soaking in it aside. Then he returned the coat to the closet where he had found it. Next, as silently, he stole into Junior’s room and repeated the process with his hunting-jacket, using another glass and piece of gauze.
“While I am out of the room, Walter,” he said, “I want you to take these two glasses, cover them, and number them and on a slip of paper which you must retain, place the names of the owners of the respective coats. I don’t like this part of it—I hate to play spy and would much rather come out in the open, but there is nothing else to do, and it is much better for all concerned that I should play the game secretly just now. There may be no cause for suspicion at all. In that case I’d never forgive myself for starting a family row. And then again but we shall see.”
After I had numbered and recorded the glasses Kennedy returned, and we went downstairs again.
“Curious about the will, isn’t it?” I remarked as we stood on the wide verandah a moment.
“Yes,” he replied. “It may be necessary to go back to New York to delve into that part of it before we get through, but I hope not. We’ll wait.”
At this point the groom interrupted us to say that he had caught the rabbits. Kennedy at once hurried to the stable. There he rolled up his sleeves, pricked a vein in his arm, and injected a small quantity of his own blood into one of the rabbits. The other he did not touch.
It was late in the afternoon when Tom returned from town with his uncle and cousin. He seemed even more agitated than usual. Without a word he hurried up from the landing and sought us out.
“What do you think of that?” he cried, opening a copy of the Record, and laying it flat on the library table.
There on the front page was Lewis Langley’s picture with a huge scare-head:
MYSTERIOUS CASE OF SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION
“It’s all out,” groaned Tom, as we bent over to read the account. “And such a story!”
Under the date of the day previous, a Saranac despatch ran:
Lewis Langley, well known as sporting man and club member in New York, and eldest son of the late Lewis Langley, the banker, was discovered dead under the most mysterious circumstances this morning at Camp Hangout, twelve miles from this town.
The Death of “Old Krook” in Dickens’s “Bleak House” or of the victim in one of Marryat’s most thrilling tales was not more gruesome than this actual fact. It is without doubt a case of spontaneous human combustion, such as is recorded beyond dispute in medical and medico-legal text-books of the past two centuries. Scientists in this city consulted for the Record agree that, while rare, spontaneous human combustion is an established fact and