Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 1, September 17, 1927

OUR STARE GREW WILD AS RUGGLES AND I READ THE NOTE: “THIS PAPER HAS TRANSMITTED TO YOU A DEADLY DISEASE: YOU ARE DOOMED!”

Chapter I The Letter

“Don’t turn around yet,” Ruggles said guardedly, “but, after a moment, take a look just behind us at that middle-aged man, tall, slender, walking with a limp just behind us — I say; he’s following us.”

We had just come down the steps of our snug little apartment on West Eighty-Sixth Street for a little fresh air in the late afternoon. I at least was exhausted by our work on a particularly dangerous and exacting case we had finished not two hours ago, and I was in no mood immediately to start in on a new one.

Ruggles’s word, however, that a man was following us had a warning in it which I could not ignore. So, at the next crossing I looked idly back, then, as we walked on, I said:

“I’ve spotted the man, but I don’t believe he’s following us.”

“All right,” Ruggles said; “we’ll keep on down here to Riverside Drive, then turn back, and you will see that he will.”

Ruggles was right; the middle-aged man, keeping always on the opposite side of the street from us, now turned and stepped down off the curb, crossing diagonally as if about to speak to us, narrowly escaping being run down by a taxi while doing it.

“This is a new turn in an old situation,” Ruggles said, as we walked slowly back in the direction of our apartment.

“I don’t see anything new in it,” I said. “This man is following us for some reason, and a good many men have done that. Probably he’s working for some of our friends who are trying for a pot shot at you. We’d better walk on up to the subway and go down town, giving him the slip in the crowd.”

“No,” Ruggles said, “I don’t want to give him the slip. You’ve missed the new turn I told you about; this man is not working for any of our enemies; he is an anxious amateur. In addition to that, he is utterly exhausted. I was wrong in saying he walked with a limp — in his case the reason is physical weakness.”

“Then let him go to his doctor,” I said. “The thing for us to do is to dodge this invalid—”

“No,” Ruggles said. “We’ll go home and let him follow us in; then we can hear his story before he collapses. Hold on, there he goes now — down on the sidewalk!”

Ruggles forced his way through the crowd which instantly had gathered about the man who now lay, conscious, but too weak to rise, on the sidewalk.

“You wanted to speak to me, I believe,” my companion said, bending over him.

“Yes,” the man said hoarsely. “I must talk with you while I can, Mr. Ruggles. At your rooms, if you will—”

“Crane and I will take you there at once, and you can rest first, then tell us what you desire to. Here, taxi!”

For a moment, I wondered if the traffic officer, who had come up to disperse the crowd, was going to question us. I knew that, if he did, Ruggles and I would be hard put, for, though the man called Ruggles by name, neither of us had ever seen him before — and now we were putting him in a taxi, in effect were running away with him.

The policeman did not question us. We lifted the man into the taxi. Ruggles pointed up the street to where our apartment was, and we started.

Our mysterious guest spoke suddenly: “Open the windows!” he commanded weakly.

“Do you feel faint?” Ruggles asked.

“Yes,” the other said, “but that is not the reason why you must instantly open the windows. I am coming down with a serious illness, I believe, and I do not want to give it to either of you.”

“No danger of that,” Ruggles reassured him, throwing open one of the doors and holding it as we drove along. “With this wind blowing through, it will be all right. Don’t try to talk in this racket; we shall be at my apartment in no time. It is just up the block, here.”

“I know,” the man said with difficulty. “I watched you come out of it — then I began following you.”

When we had assisted him to the couch in our quiet living room and he had seen us lock the street door and pull the heavy portières across the windows, our guest said in panting breaths:

“I must warn you again that I am stricken with a dangerous illness—”

Ruggles nodded, and said humoringly: “We will disinfect this room if you will feel any easier; it will take only an instant.”

We went to the bathroom and Ruggles poured fresh into an atomizer some of the strong antiseptic he kept always on hand; then, when we had shot it through our noses and throats, we went back into the living room.

As we did so, I whispered to Ruggles: “He certainly looks like a dead man!”

But I do not think Ruggles heard me — after one quick sniff of the air, he darted to the front door, threw it open, and looked sharply up and down the sidewalk; then he flung open the windows, letting in the strong, fresh wind from the river.

“What’s the matter?” I cried. “Going to leave everything open so that the whole town can come in?”

“The first thing to do is to get this gas out.”

“Gas?”

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “and a deadly gas, too. There, this is better. Now we are all right! He was quick about it; shot the gas into the room, then rushed down the front steps and hid himself in the crowd! Undoubtedly I saw his back; but there was no way I could tell which he was.”

Ruggles, leaving me staring in bewilderment, went back to the motionless figure on the couch.

“But how did it get in here,” I demanded, “this gas you’re talking about? The front door was locked and everything shut—”

“Everything but the keyhole in our front door,” Ruggles whispered to me over his shoulder. “The gas was shot through the keyhole from a tiny gas-pistol which, by a queer inconsistency of the law of this State, any individual is permitted to carry.”

“I still don’t see—”

“The gas was sent in here as easily as the antiseptic was sent from the atomizer into our throats and noses — just the pressure of a rubber bulb and the air in the bulb pushed the gas through the keyhole into the room.”

“It’s good you noticed it.”

“It was good that this fine wind blew in through this room — there was undoubtedly enough gas in the gun to kill all three of us; this man here is not dead, only unconscious. I’ll go through his pockets before he comes to.”

Ruggles had his practical, skilled hands in and out of the man’s clothes in a moment, bringing from the man’s inside right breast pocket something which made us wonder: a letter which made us stare:

Ruggles put the letter back in the envelope which he had taken out with it; then he put the envelope back in the unconscious man’s pocket.

“Boiling water kills every known germ,” my companion said. “Open that door into the kitchen — I don’t want to touch it with my hands — put on a small saucepan of hot water from the pipe there, then give it the biggest burner on the gas stove!”

I obeyed him instantly. We watched the water in the little saucepan wriggle, then begin to quiver; then it began to boil, first lazily, then furiously. Ruggles darted his hands in, then dried them.

“Now turn off the gas, Dan,” he said.

Chapter II Beyond Hope

“Feeling better, I hope,” Ruggles said, as we saw Richard Grew open his eyes and look about him.

“Yes, I am better, but it will not be for long, I think. Let me talk to you while I am able to.” He lifted himself on his elbow. “I have a letter in my pocket—”

“I read it,” Ruggles said. “There was no time to wait. I have sterilized my hands. There is no danger. Who sent you that letter? Do you know?”

“I believe that I do, but—”

“Tell me who he is! Where is he? Rouse yourself!” Ruggles put his strong, sympathetic hand on the weak shoulder. “Tell me, and I promise—”

“I dare not tell you, for this man is a fiend in human form. Save my daughter! Go to my house, where she is, and stay with her — that alone can protect her sufficiently. Not even you can do anything for me; he has struck, and his blow is sure.” His elbow, on which he had leaned, gave way, and he slid down on the couch on his side.

“You are ill, as you have said,” Ruggles cried. “Let me call in your family doctor to care for you!”

“No,” Grew said with an effort. “Not that. Think only of my daughter, Margaret!” He collapsed then, and his voice trailed off in a groan that was more a gasp.

“Undo his collar,” I cried. “If we get him more air—”

“He is burning up with a fever,” Ruggles said, “and must be taken at once to a hospital. Phone to Dr. Whittimore to come with an ambulance! Then, God help us, we’ll run down Richard Grew’s murderer.”

“Murderer?”

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “for I believe, as this man does, that he is suffering from a fatal malady brought on by his having touched that letter.”

I was at the phone in a moment, and almost as soon, Dr. Whittimore arrived. He was a grave-looking man, whose office was only a few doors from us; we had called in Whittimore in many a case before this, but I had never seen him look more anxious than when he had completed his swift examination.

“The ambulance will be here immediately,” he said. “There’s its bell now. Help me carry him, will you?”

When they had gone down the steps and Ruggles had returned for an instant with the doctor, Whittimore said in a swift and guarded undertone: “I know you’re used to queer things, Ruggles, and take long chances when it comes to another man’s gun or knife, but there are things even more dangerous than those, and you ought to realize it.”

“Speak out, Whittimore,” Ruggles said.

“I will. How long has that case, that’s now on the way to my hospital, been in this room with both of you?”

“Half an hour, perhaps.”

“I hope you’re alive to-morrow.”

“I mean to be. Crane and I have flushed our throats and noses with a strong solution of—”

Whittimore smelled our atomizer. “That stuff,” he said, “is perfectly good when it come to nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, but it may not be strong enough for the present case; I can’t say definitely yet, but it looks to me as if this man were suffering from one of those excessively virulent tropical diseases—”

“I tell you, I’ve taken adequate precautions!”

“Oh, I know, Ruggles, you’ve managed to pick up an extraordinarily lot of practical knowledge somehow about poisons, antidotes, and such stuff, surgery and medicine generally, and most diseases won’t fool you much, but when it comes to—”

“Amazon fever, you mean?” Ruggles asked.

“What did you say?” Whittimore snapped.

“I said Amazon fever. I think Mr. Grew is suffering from that.”

“You mean those eruptions on his hands?”

“No, those are only Natal sores.”

“Natal—” Whittimore stopped, staring open-mouthed.

“Natal sores,” Ruggles repeated. “They come from getting some of the red earth of Natal in an open cut or scratch — anywhere the skin has been broken. Mr. Grew is evidently just back from Natal.”

“Where’s that?” Whittimore demanded blankly.

“South Africa.”

“Is he just back from the Amazon, too?” Whittimore scoffed. “I’ll admit, as I just said, that your head is stocked with all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge, and you’ve surprised me and a lot of other people more than once; but you’ve tripped yourself this time — how could that man in my ambulance have just got back from Natal, South Africa, and yet have been on the Amazon, in South America, recently enough to come down with Amazon fever only now?”

“I did not say he had been in South America,” Ruggles replied, rather sharply, I thought.

“But you said he had been, I mean that he had Amazon fever,” Whittimore insisted, “and you ought to know there’s none of that disease in this country — he simply couldn’t have developed it here. He’d have had to go to South America to get it. I tell you, you’ve caught yourself this time, Ruggles!”

“No, I haven’t; he could have caught it by going to South America or—”

“Or,” Dr. Whittimore laughed, “on second thought, don’t you think he may be suffering from sleeping sickness? That’s an African disease, and he might have caught it when he was in Natal, South Africa, getting those Natal sores you spoke about on his hands.”

“He has not sleeping sickness,” Ruggles said; “and, even if he had, he could not have caught it in Natal, for the tsetse fly, whose bite causes sleeping sickness, is never found south of Delegoa Bay.”

“All right, all right,” Dr. Whittimore said in a bewildered way, and putting his hat on back to front, “I’m only a general practitioner, and when you get into that sort of thing — sub-equatorial stuff — I’ve got to admit you get too deep for me. I guess our man’s got Amazon fever, if you say so, but I’ll phone you from the hospital.”

“Do so,” Ruggles said. “Here,” scribbling on a piece of paper, “is your patient’s name and address. To send for his daughter, Margaret, will be to subject her to unnecessary danger from contagion and profit her nothing, for her father will not recover consciousness.”

“I’ll phone you,” Dr. Whittimore repeated, taking the bit of paper from Ruggles. Then he went down the steps and swiftly out to his car.

Chapter III A Compelling Reason

“And now,” Ruggles said, “this letter and my laboratory — though I believe that an examination of the germs is unnecessary.” He took the letter from his pocket as he spoke.

“But,” I said, “I thought you put that back in Mr. Grew’s pocket.”

“I did, the first time; but I got it again after he had refused to tell us the name and address of his murderer. No, Dan,” Ruggles went on as I started to enter his laboratory with him, “I would not come in if I were you; you can’t help me in the least, and these things are in the highest degree dangerous — hand me that face-mask there, will you? And those skin rubber gloves? Thanks.

“Now run out. I’ll be as quick as I can, then I’ll tell you what I’ve found. Give your nose and throat another good flushing with the atomizer, as I’m going to do, in the meantime!”

He closed the door into the laboratory a moment later, and all I could do was to follow his instructions and wait for his verdict.

I had not long to wait; the laboratory door soon opened. Ruggles had taken off the face mask and the skin rubber gloves he always wore when making his more dangerous examinations, and he was drying his hands on a towel.

“Just as I thought,” he said; “enough germs of Amazon fever on that letter to give the disease to fifty men.”

“On the letter?” I asked.

“Yes — put there by the man who wrote the letter and did not sign it.”

“There must be finger-prints.”

“Yes, but they will probably prove to be only those of Richard Grew, the victim. The man, who staged this, wouldn’t be fool enough to leave finger-prints.”

“Then all we get from this letter is the fact that it held enough Amazon fever germs to kill Grew and forty others?”

“No,” Ruggles said, “the letter tells us far more than that; it tells us that the man who wrote this letter knew there was no need of his signing the letter; and this corroborates Grew’s own statement — he said that the man had struck and that his blow was sure; the writer of the letter knew that his victim would know who had struck him down.”

The telephone rang then and Ruggles answered it. It was Dr. Whittimore, calling up from the hospital to say that Richard Grew had just died without recovering consciousness and that his malady had been diagnosed, by the hospital experts, as Amazon fever.

“Don’t tell his daughter,” Ruggles said, “until I have had a talk with her. Be sure of this and have the others there understand it — I must talk with her before she is told. What?” There was a pause. Then Ruggles went on:

“Well, of course, it can’t be helped now, but I am afraid that a grave mistake has been made. She undoubtedly is at her home, and Crane and I will go right over. Thanks, Whittimore. Oh, of course, you’ll record the name and number of any calls that come in asking how Mr. Grew is. Yes, that’s the ticket!”

Ruggles rang off and turned to me, saying: “One of the young doctors notified Miss Grew of her father’s death and she has all but collapsed — rushed to the hospital, not allowed to see her father for fear of contagion, and all that; had to be taken back to her home with a nurse.

“The family doctor, Spaulding, happened to come in, and, of course, got the facts and gave the nurse and all the hospital staff, including Whittimore, particular thunder. Spaulding is taking care of Miss Grew at the Grew home and now we’ve got to go there and see her.”

As we entered our car and drove in the direction of West Seventy-Sixth Street, toward the address which Richard Grew had given us, Ruggles said:

“We’ve got to move very carefully, Dan, for the man who killed Grew by giving him those germs in that letter knows you and me and, having failed in his first attempt to kill us, will soon try again.”

“You say he tried to kill us? When?”

“Why, when he shot that poison gas through the keyhole into our living room.”

“But I don’t see how that proves that he was trying to kill us.”

“Don’t you? Look at it this way! The man knew that Grew was as good as dead from the germs on the letter. The poison gas was for you and me, and if we’d breathed a little of it, we’d have been dead as the petrified bodies the scientists dig up among the ruins of Pompeii.

“It was what is known as Saccari’s gas, invented by an Italian: it gives off, for the first moment, the odor of almonds and that odor is harmless; that was the odor I got and it warned me. In another minute or two we’d have been dead as Hector.”

“But,” I said, “if his poison gas was so deadly and so sure, why didn’t this man go to Grew’s house, late some night, and gas him to death in his bedroom? That would have been much easier and quicker than hunting up these Amazon fever germs and getting them into Grew’s system by the medium of a letter.”

“That’s perfectly true,” Ruggles admitted. “The fact that our man killed Grew in this roundabout way shows that he had some compelling reason for doing it — probably to throw suspicion on some other man, Dan. See if I’m not right.”

“Do you think we shall find out anything from Miss Grew?” I asked.

“Nothing to-night, I think. I should not be surprised if the family doctor refuses to let us see her, at least until considerably later in the evening.”

Ruggles looked at his watch. “It’s only six now. I thought it much later. We’ll get dinner first, then go to the Grew home right after that. I hate to intrude on her at such a time, but whatever she can or will tell us now we can use to the greatest advantage.”

“What will you do if the doctor, Spaulding, Whittimore said, didn’t he, won’t let us see her?”

“That depends on what sort Dr. Spaulding is. We can’t tell that until we’ve seen him.”

At half past seven, we rang the doorbell at the Grew home and we were received by Dr. Spaulding. He was medium-sized, slender, energetic, and in his late forties, restless, rather handsome, and accustomed, evidently, to carrying things with a high hand.

He said at once; “I am glad to see you, Mr. Ruggles and—” He looked at me, bowed, and waited for Ruggles to introduce me. “Of course, Mr. Crane,” the doctor said, frankly holding out his well-shaped hand to me. “I should have remembered, as I do now, what the newspapers said of your part in the capture of Foley, the murderer.”

“It was an interesting case,” I said, “and Foley gave us some busy moments when the show-down came.”

Dr. Spaulding nodded, then turned to Ruggles and said: “Sit down, both of you, won’t you? You will excuse me for standing, but this tragedy has upset me a good deal. Grew and I were such old friends, and to have him go off like this — I can hardly believe it, even now!”

The family doctor took a turn about the room, then came back to where we were sitting and stood, facing us, leaning on the center table before the open fireplace.

“You did not know Mr. Grew well. I did, and yet at times I felt as if he were the completest stranger. He would go away for weeks, months at a time, taking only his daughter, and wandering with her—”

“Had he visited Africa before his recent trip there?” Ruggles asked abruptly.

“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” Dr. Spaulding replied in a way which showed me he had not paid the least attention to Ruggles’s latest question. “I know your record, Mr. Ruggles, and that was why I sent Grew to you.

“He insisted that he was ill, but I examined him without discovering a sign of anything. When it seemed to me that he was in deadly terror of some one, and that soon became evident, I realized that it was a case where he needed you more than he needed his family doctor — so I gave him your address and sent him to you.”

“What did he say,” Ruggles asked, “which made you think he stood in deadly terror of any one?”

“He kept telling me,” Dr. Spaulding replied, “that some one, whose name he told me he dared not give me, had poisoned him through the means of a letter and that, as a result, he was coming down with a fatal illness.

“I repeat: I examined him then, and found no trace of anything beyond an extreme excitation of the nervous system. I sent him to you, then, hoping that he would tell you more than he told me and that you could either laugh him out of a delusion, if you believed his case that, or be enabled, by what he confided to you, to get on the track of his enemy, in case you concluded that he actually had one.

“My plan was that, after he had seen you, he would return to me, I should examine him from time to time, and of course if any malady revealed itself, I would treat it instantly. That letter! Did he show it to you?”

“No,” Ruggles replied, with as keen disappointment as I had ever seen him show. “When he spoke of it, I asked him, of course, to let me see it, but he refused point-blank. Then he lost consciousness and I got Dr. Whittimore, who immediately had him taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I did not know at that time of your position in the household, Dr. Spaulding.”

“Perfectly all right,” the family doctor said. “You did exactly the right thing! But about that letter: we’ve got to get hold of that.”

“Yes,” Ruggles said, “and we may be said to have a right to open it now.” He rose to his feet, “Let me use your phone for a moment, will you?” In an instant, Ruggles had Whittimore at the hospital, and was saying, “Whittimore, this is Ruggles. Of course all Mr. Grew’s personal effects have been saved? Yes, that’s what I felt sure of.

“Say, Whittimore, I wish you’d seal up that letter in a big envelope and keep it for me. I’ll be right down after it, Crane or I or perhaps Dr. Spaulding, Grew’s family doctor. What? Not there?” There was a pause, then Ruggles said, “Whittimore, it’s impossible that that could have got lost. Look again, like a good man.”

There was another pause, this time long. Then Ruggles said over the telephone, “Well, there’s no good in crying over spilt milk. Must have been lost — got out of his pocket, maybe, while your men were carrying him down the steps and into the ambulance; and the wind there was blowing then would have carried it anywhere — we’ll never see it again. All right. Get along without it. Good night, Whittimore.”

Chapter IV The First Sign

Ruggles hung up, then turned to Spaulding and me, saying:

“You heard what I said. Letter’s gone. Got to do without it.”

Spaulding said nothing, just stared at Ruggles, cupping his heavy chin with his muscular hand. Then he said shortly, “We’ve got to find that letter!”

“Of course, on the face of it. But, from a practical standpoint, how about it? The time lost in hunting for it, I mean! No, I prefer, all things considered, to get along without it. That’s why I’m here, doctor: to see Miss Grew and find whether her father said anything to her—”

“She’s too ill to be seen now,” Dr. Spaulding said; “but, in a couple of hours, say at half past nine, that’s about an hour and a half. Come back here then. Now wait: half past nine — she ought to be in bed and asleep then. Come at half past eight — that’s about an hour from now; and, if her condition warrants it—”

The family doctor seemed to have fallen into the habit of not finishing his sentences. He looked off, straight ahead, in the distance and began again, “I’m sure she won’t have heard anything about the letter: her father regards her as a child, though she’s no longer one, and wouldn’t have bothered her with—” Again his voice trailed off.

“Do you know anything about the letter?” Ruggles asked abruptly.

“Only what you have told me and what he told me — what I have said to you.”

“All right,” Ruggles said. “Now, look at this angle of it: it is a fact that Grew died of Amazon fever and it is equally true that Amazon fever could have been given him only through germs of the disease.

“He was sure he had been given the germs of a disease. The disease proved to be Amazon fever. Who could have given him Amazon fever germs?”

“Who, indeed?” asked Dr. Spaulding.

“Do you know whether or not Grew had any active enemy?”

“As a detective, whom Grew consulted,” Dr. Spaulding said thoughtfully, “you probably have the right — I might even say it was your duty to ask me that question. But, as his friend and his family doctor, I am not sure that I have a right to answer it.”

“Very well,” Ruggles said, “is that all you care to say?”

“No,” Spaulding said, choosing his words very carefully, “if I were a detective, handling this case, I should take into consideration the ages of the respective members of the Grew family and their friends and acquaintances — I should go through that list with my imagination alive and my eyes open—”

“Look here,” Ruggles broke in, “why don’t you speak out?”

“Because,” Spaulding said, looking Ruggles squarely in the eye, “what I would say would be only conjecture, and I don’t want any man hanged through a chain of circumstantial evidence I might unconsciously have started.

“It’s just that, if I were you, in addition to what I said a moment ago, I would find the man who recently brought Amazon fever germs into this country.”

“Why did he go to South Africa?” Ruggles said.

“He didn’t,” said Dr. Spaulding.

“I mean Mr. Grew.”

“Of course,” said the family doctor. He lighted a cigarette and puffed out thick clouds of smoke without inhaling. “About Grew—” he said, behind the smoke cloud, “I don’t know why he went to Africa, except that he was fond of traveling. Oh, pardon me!” He took out his cigarette case and held it out to Ruggles.

“Thanks,” Ruggles said, taking the cigarette Spaulding handed him. “Oh, sorry! Thank you!” The cigarette had fallen from his fingers and Dr. Spaulding picked it up from the floor and gave it back to Ruggles.

My companion took out his holder, struck a match, and, after inserting the cigarette, puffed it gratefully, saying, after a moment: “These are extremely good. What make are they?”

“Some I have my tobacconist put up for me. I shall be glad to send you some. The blend was recommended to me, by the way, by a young man whom, for excellent reasons, Richard Grew forbade coming to his house.

“Grew had met him traveling somewhere. However unsavory his reputation was from a Puritan’s standpoint, he smoked excellent cigarettes; and he was very clever, too — sent to almost every part of the world as a bacteriologist.”

“An interesting experience, that must be,” Ruggles said idly. “Does he live in New York?”

“Part of the time.”

“I may have met him without knowing his history. What is his name?”

“If you are trying to save me the trouble of getting my tobacconist to put up some of these cigarettes for you,” Dr. Spaulding said with perfect composure and a slight, shrewd smile, “you may save yourself your anxiety: I shall be only too happy to arrange your receipt of the cigarettes myself. As a matter of fact, you would find this young man not a desirable acquaintance — I might say even a dangerous one: he is a civilized savage who will stop at nothing to attain his ends.”

“Stop at nothing,” Ruggles said quietly. “Would not stop at deliberate murder, you think?”

“No,” Spaulding said evenly, “not even at deliberate murder. I say this unwillingly, but I believe it is the truth. I think of him with anxiety, Mr. Ruggles, for the reason that only recently I have made a mortal enemy of him.”

Spaulding slowly turned his wrist so that he could see the small, jewel-set watch on it. “You will return at half past eight?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ruggles said. “And let me acknowledge your assistance in this case, Dr. Spaulding.”

The family doctor bowed, but said nothing, and went down the front steps to the street in silence.

“What sort of a cigarette was that he gave you?” I asked, after a few moments, as we drove slowly uptown.

“I will tell you that,” Ruggles said quietly, “after I have analyzed it in the laboratory.”

“What?”

“I said,” Ruggles repeated, “after I have analyzed it in our laboratory.”

“But you smoked it. I saw you do it!”

“No, I didn’t smoke it, Dan. I dropped it, and while Dr. Spaulding was picking it up I got out one of my own and palmed his when he gave it to me a second time: the cigarette which I put in my holder and lighted and smoked was my own.

“It fooled you, who were watching me, and it undoubtedly fooled Spaulding, who had turned his eyes away from me for the fraction of a second. By the way, did you notice his right hand, when he handed that cigarette to me?”

“I noticed a small, freshly-made cut on the top of his first finger, between the first and the second joint.”

“It is that small cut that I mean,” Ruggles said, “and it could have been made by a screw which had worked out of the metal frame about a keyhole — a screw whose head has been broken by a screwdriver leaving a tiny, jagged fragment of steel sharp as glass.”

“What under the sun do you mean?”

“It could have been made,” Ruggles went on, “if a man had thrust the small barrel of a gas pistol through that keyhole; his first finger, between the first joint and the second, would have come smartly against the sharp, jagged bit of screw head. You may understand now, Dan, why I did not care to smoke Dr. Spaulding’s cigarette.”

“But,” I said, “couldn’t a hundred other things have cut his finger that way?”

“A hundred or a thousand other things could have, but they didn’t. Believe it or not, our torn screw head was what tore that finger of his; and I wouldn’t smoke his cigarette for all the gold the Spaniards stole from the Aztecs.

“Wait until we’ve got home and I’ve analyzed this attractively put together combination of tissue paper, tobacco, and whatever deadly thing Dr. Spaulding has hidden in it. Then I think you’ll believe me.”

“I believe you now,” I said.

“Wait,” Ruggles said quietly. “I’d rather show you than hurry you.”

Chapter V With All His Power

As soon as we got back to our apartment, Ruggles hurried into his laboratory, and before he closed the door I saw him put on the mask and the skin rubber gloves I had seen him don an hour earlier.

Then he closed the door and I went through our living room into our vestibule and from there to our front door, for I wanted to have a look at the screw which Ruggles said had worked loose in the metal under our keyhole.

And there it was — loose as he had said, its protruding head twisted nearly off at some time by a screwdriver, raising a tiny, upstanding sliver of metal, jagged and sharp as broken glass.

Carefully avoiding this knifelike sliver of metal, I worked the screw out with my fingers and, bringing it into the living room, held it to the light — and there, on the screw’s head, was a freshly dried drop of blood.

I was as sure, then, as anything in the world could have made me, that that was Dr. Spaulding’s blood, let out of his first finger when he had thrust the tiny barrel of his gas pistol through that keyhole, and had sent those deadly gas fumes into our living room.

It was all clear to me now. But how had Ruggles the power so surely and swiftly to identify the criminal and understand the workings of the criminal mind? That extraordinary power of his bewildered and amazed me more with every revelation he gave me of it.

Where had he learned all that he had of the Criminal and Crime? What hard school had he gone to, and when? More than once he had said to me:

“I’m a near-crook, Dan, but I wear better.” What he meant by that, I was probably never to know. So far, he had never explained, and I had never asked for an explanation. And yet there were times when I asked myself how any man could know the underworld as Ruggles knew it without having been, at some time in his life, a member of it.

Was there, in his life, a past which some detective, or some enemy, one day would drag forth? And how would Ruggles’s resourcefulness and shrewdness serve him then? I couldn’t banish this thought.

For he knew the underworld so intimately and well; its most subtle secrets; he could tread so unerringly the darkest jungles of the worst districts of the world’s greatest cities! How had he been able to master so perfectly their crime-code? How had he learned to anticipate and checkmate, as he invariably did, organized crime’s efforts at merciless discipline and quick revenge? Ruggles alone could answer this.

In age, he was still in his early thirties, and he was marvelously equipped to tread the dark and dubious ways along which his strange profession called him; he was well over six feet in height, weighing always between two hundred and two ten stripped, he had the tremendous hitting power of the best heavyweight, and he combined with that the speed and endurance and catlike activity of foot which one expects to find only among the lighter weights.

If he had the hatred and fear of the chiefs and lower officers of the best organized and most highly financed syndicates of crime in Manhattan, as well as those of London, Vienna, Paris, Petrograd, and Berlin, he had their grim respect, too — they knew that, in addition to being their most dreaded enemy, he had always fought them fair.

He knew them — all of them were on his list. With the precision and steadiness of a perfectly operating machine and the inevitableness of destiny, Ruggles was capturing and convicting one after another of Manhattan’s most dangerous and clever criminals — he was working on down the list and now had got to where those, whom he had not yet come to, realized that their only means of escape from him lay in bringing about his death.

It was a little over four years since I had begun to work with him as his assistant, and in that time I had learned not to be surprised at anything which he, or our enemies, might do.

He had an extraordinary knowledge of biology, natural history, surgery, and medicine; and I believe that he had no equal when it came to a practical knowledge of poisons, ancient, medieval, and modern, and their antidotes — and this knowledge he had to have, to keep ahead of our sleepless antagonists.

He was an extremely clever mechanic, and this had saved our lives many times — infernal machines, for example, like the one Slade had put in our open fireplace, or the one Stanfield had placed behind the picture in Roger Sterling’s bedroom in that strange case where we had our final reckoning with Quin Lash, the alligator hunter, all were familiar to Ruggles.

His restless and eager mind was a veritable storehouse of information on every subject under the sun, always ready at the call of his photographic memory; and his power of quick and accurate deduction baffled me more with every revelation he gave me of it.

He insisted to me that he was not a detective, and certainly he had no connection with any detective agency. He was the unfailing ally of the innocent who, without his help, could not prove their innocence. But the predatory animal, whether the head or the unsuspected protector of crime, or the savage executor of desperate violence, Ruggles handled without gloves, showing them no mercy, for well he knew that they would show him none when the final show-down came.

If he broke the law — and he frequently did — it was always to right a wrong and never for his own gain; his sins were always benevolent.

Our capture of Dr. Webster, murderer and master hypnotist, had brought us again a publicity we had not wanted; this had resulted in our receiving a flood of new clients. Most of these, Ruggles turned over, or rather directed, to the local authorities, keeping for us to handle only those cases which seemed to him to present some special need or to offer points of unusual interest.

Our present case had come to us out of thin air. Providence might have been said to have sent Richard Grew to us, not soon enough to save his own life it was true, for the germs of the deadly Amazon fever had worked too long in his system for that; but there remained his daughter, Margaret.

Her father, with his last conscious words, had begged Ruggles and me to save her, and Ruggles, in the small laboratory behind that closed door at my back, now was working for Margaret Grew’s safety with all his power.

Chapter VI A Mysterious Message

The laboratory door opened and he came in, saying: “More Amazon fever germs, Dan.”

“Where?”

“In the cigarette.”

“Dr. Spaulding’s?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll arrest him to-night.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Why not? We’ye got evidence enough.”

“Enough to convict the ordinary criminal, but not enough to convict Dr. Spaulding.”

“What defense can he offer?”

“A hundred different ones.”

“But if you testify to having found these deadly germs on the cigarette he gave you—”

“That wouldn’t bother him a bit.”

“Not when coming right after his patient, Richard Grew, died of Amazon fever? Wouldn’t those two things, coming together, convict Spaulding?”

“Not necessarily. Dr. Spaulding would argue that some one had undoubtedly tried to kill him by means of germs — put them in his cigarettes, don’t you see? — germs like those which had killed Richard Grew. You get it now, don’t you? Abundant evidence to cause his arrest, but not enough to convict him.”

“How about that little cut on the first finger of his right hand? There is a drop of dried blood on that screw-head. Here it is. I took the screw out of the metal around our front door keyhole.”

“Even if we proved that was Spaulding’s blood, he could probably convince a jury that he had come here to see us and, in jiggling the doorknob, had cut his finger on the loose screw; it would not prove that he had shot poisoned gas into our living room.

“I am sure he killed Grew and that he tried to kill us; but as yet I can’t prove it. We’ve got to move very cautiously or he will see we suspect him, then he’ll be more careful than ever.”

“It strikes me he hasn’t been very careful so far.”

“He has, though. He didn’t do a thing until he got perfectly well set — some one he could throw direct suspicion on, I mean this bacteriologist. We’ve got to locate this man; but first we’ve got to see Margaret Grew, the woman in the case, who is probably in love with the bacteriologist.”

“What makes you think that?”

“If she hadn’t been, why would Richard Grew have forbidden the young man to come to the house? Doesn’t that show us not only one thing, but two: that he was in love with Miss Grew and that she was in love with him? Doesn’t it, as a matter of fact, show us something else also: that Dr. Spaulding was in love with Miss Grew and that he found another man was her accepted suitor and so, to get this rival out of the field, trumped up a bad reputation for him?

“We’ll see Margaret Grew and Dr. Spaulding together; the way he acts will show us whether or not this theory of mine is right. Come, Dan; it’s a quarter after eight; we’re due there at eight thirty; that means it’s time we started.”

“I don’t like going there,” I said; “it means getting into Dr. Spaulding’s clutches again, and, this time, there’s no telling what he’ll do to us.”

“What I’m thinking about,” Ruggles said, “is how he’s going to look when he sees I’m apparently healthy though he’s sure he saw me smoke one of his cigarettes. On my soul, Dan, I don’t know yet whether Spaulding is innocent and stupid or guilty and clever.

“One thing, we’ll know in a few moments — whether or not he’s in love with her. Come, let’s get started! If this is the last time we ever see these rooms of ours, Dan, we’ve at least had interesting experiences in them.”

The family doctor received us at the Grew home without any sign of surprise and, it must be admitted, without any particular show of interest.

I thought once that his keen eyes lingered on Ruggles’s bronzed face and athletic carriage, but I knew I might be mistaken — that I was, in short, looking for it and so might imagine it. I remembered, too, that Spaulding might be innocent.

Spaulding offered Ruggles another cigarette and, this time as an hour and a half before, Ruggles palmed it, substituted one of his own for it, and smoked it pleasurably. I had, as it happened, sworn off smoking for a month, and had told Spaulding that at our first meeting, so now he did not offer me tobacco.

Looking at Ruggles, the family doctor said: “Now, if you would like to talk with Miss Grew for a few moments, I am sure I can arrange it.”

“If you think it will be all right on her side,” Ruggles said, “we should appreciate it.”

Spaulding pressed a bell; a maid entered; he gave her his instructions, and she returned in a moment saying that Miss Grew would receive us in the upstairs living room, and we followed the maid up the stairs.

Miss Grew was perhaps twenty-three, tall, erect, and strikingly lovely. Her dark eyes were heavy from weeping, and her voice was not steady when she pronounced our names as Spaulding introduced us. After that, she sat silent and motionless, looking, I noticed, not at us but at the family doctor, as if waiting for him to speak.

He said: “Margaret, just before your father was taken ill, he went to Mr. Ruggles’s rooms to consult him. Mr. Ruggles and Mr. Crane are detectives.”

“Yes,” the girl said, “he told me—” Then she stopped short, hesitated, putting her hands to her forehead, as if trying to recall what she had been about to say. “I cannot — remember,” she faltered. “I am not — sure.” She looked at Ruggles and me vaguely.

“That is natural, just now,” Ruggles said. “Your father told me—”

“You can understand, Margaret,” the family doctor broke in, “that your father spoke confidentially to Mr. Ruggles. That, under the circumstances, would be expected. He—”.

The telephone rang then on the floor below and a maid answered it, appearing in the doorway a moment later and announcing that the call was for Mr. Ruggles.

A look of sharpest annoyance for a moment showed on my companion’s face; then he excused himself and followed the maid down the stairs.

While he was out of the room none of us spoke, and the only one to move was Dr. Spaulding, when he lowered a window-shade to keep a faint ray of light from the street from entering the room. The man, for some reason, was suffering now from something more pronounced than nervousness. He could not take his eyes from the girl, who sat motionless, her head resting on her hand, opposite him.

As Ruggles entered the room he was scribbling a note, which he handed to me, saying: “Dan, I wish you’d take that to Captain Shannon at police headquarters. Read it and add anything you like to it, then give it to him.”

“All right,” I said, starting into the hall. I excused myself to Miss Grew, and in a moment was out on the sidewalk, reading the note in the light from the first store I came to.

The note read:

I read the note again, and this time got the last paragraph: M. G., of course, was Margaret Grew; and C. S. meant Dr. Spaulding It meant that Ruggles, in his uncanny way, had solved the puzzle already: instead of a murderer, Dr. Spaulding was innocent and so needed to be helped, in fact to be protected, rather than to be watched and dreaded.

I went into the first drug store I could find and called up the Grew home, asking, in a disguised voice, if Dr. Spaulding were there and being told by the maid, of course, that he was, I asked to speak to him.

The maid left the wire then came back saying that Dr. Spaulding was engaged and would call me later if I would leave my name and my telephone number.

There was no way, then, but to say that I was an old friend of the doctor and would keep him only a moment, but that I wanted to have him dine with me at my hotel tomorrow. I said that I wanted to surprise him, and for that reason would not give my name to him.

“What’s this nonsense?” Dr. Spaulding’s voice broke in so abruptly that it seemed to me he must have been listening on a branch telephone, and so harshly, too, that it almost surprised me into replying in my natural speaking voice. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

I wanted to get away from that voice, which snarled at me now most disagreeably.

“Who are you?” Spaulding demanded again. “I’m waiting.”

I remembered then what Ruggles had said: I must keep Spaulding on the telephone so that Ruggles could have a word in private with Margaret Grew. So I said, in the disguised voice I had adopted:

“Don’t you recognize my voice? I’m waiting!”

The hook came down with a crash.

“Did you get your party?” asked the operator.

“Yes,” I said. Then I hung up and went out to the sidewalk. My brain was in a whirl. I had given Ruggles his chance with the girl. That was all right. But Spaulding’s rasping, furious voice came back to me prophetic of ill, full of savage hate, and in every way menacing.

I wondered if, after all, he had recognized my voice; and again that uneasy, disquieting suspicion came over me: had he been listening on a branch instrument? I had not altered my voice so much when speaking to the maid.

All the world loves a lover; and I had felt, as I finished rereading Ruggles’s note, that it meant that Spaulding and Margaret Grew were in love with each other — Ruggles had written as much when he said, in the note, that we must “act quickly enough to save M. G. and C. S.”

To me that had meant that some unknown person, unknown as far as I was concerned, was threatening them. But, if Ruggles had meant that, why had he needed to have a word in private with Margaret Grew?

I walked a few blocks, turning this over in my mind and reaching no conclusion. Then, remembering that Ruggles, in the hearing of Spaulding, had told me to “take the note to Captain Shannon at police headquarters,” I went into the next shop that had a public telephone booth and got Shannon on the wire, saying:

“Shannon, this is Crane, Ruggles’s assistant. Remember, old man, if any one telephones you and asks if I called you up, just say I have!”

“Sure,” Shannon replied. “An’ say, Crane, I got that straight the first time.”

“What?”

“Sure. You give me the same message five minutes ago.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said, “but it’s all right.”

“Well, it was your voice, all right,” Shannon said. “I’ll be—”

“I feel the same way,” I interrupted him, then I hung up. Spaulding had done that, I knew — Spaulding or some person who, secreted in the next room, had overheard what Ruggles had said to me.

Chapter VII Inside an Hour

When I got to our apartment I found Ruggles there.

“Of course,” he said, when I had told him, “it doesn’t prove anything, as you say; but it is something to keep in mind. One thing is sure, though: Spaulding has completely given himself away — he is wildly, insanely in love with Margaret Grew. The Malays, you remember, call love ‘the madness,’ and I am inclined to agree with them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that, while many men will do many things for money, many men will do anything for love, and Spaulding evidently is one of them. He is infatuated with her, perfectly desperate.”

“Why desperate?”

“Because she hates the sight of him.”

“Then why does she take orders from him? You saw how she waited for him to give her the cue for what he wanted her to say.”

“That was because she is deathly afraid of him.”

“For herself?”

“No, for the man she loves.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me so, while Spaulding was talking with you on the phone. He is Cyril Stanhope, the bacteriologist. You see how the thing is rounding out — how the net about Spaulding is closing in?”

“No, I don’t see that yet.”

“You will see it inside of an hour. She is afraid of two things: that Spaulding, who she is sure killed her father, will kill young Stanhope, her lover; or, if not that, that Spaulding will be able to bring about the conviction of Stanhope for the murder of her father.”

“Say, Ruggles,” I broke out, “you go too fast for me. What, if any reason, had Spaulding for killing Richard Grew?”

“Reason enough,” Ruggles replied. “Grew had told Spaulding that he could never marry Margaret; to protect Stanhope, whom he really liked, Grew pretended to believe the evil repute Spaulding had fastened on Stanhope, and thus Grew forbade Stanhope to come to the house or have any communication with Margaret.

“But, the girl says, Spaulding surprised her and Stanhope and Mr. Grew together, and, though Spaulding showed no sign of ill feeling at the time, Margaret is sure that he killed her father and now will kill Stanhope — that or have him convicted of the murder of her father.”

“But that is impossible,” I cried.

“It may prove less impossible than you think,” Ruggles said. “I have warned her to be most careful of what she says, but she has admitted to me that, for some strange reason, young Stanhope was wildly jealous of Dr. Spaulding and had quarreled with her father because the latter had permitted Spaulding to come to the house.”

“That’s not so good,” I said.

“And, what is a great deal worse,” Ruggles said, “is the fact that Stanhope, as a bacteriologist, recently has brought Amazon fever germs back from South America and now has them in his laboratory at his rooms. However, she is sure that Stanhope is innocent.”

“Where are you going?” I asked, as Ruggles put on his hat.

“I’m going out and shan’t be back before half an hour or more. Stay here, will you, so I can get you on the phone if I want to.”

“One thing,” I said; “why did you tell Spaulding that the letter Grew received, with the germs on it, was missing?”

“I wanted to see if he wouldn’t show some signs of relief, Dan; but he didn’t show any. Just the same, I believe he’s guilty of Grew’s murder and tried to murder you and me. And I’m pretty sure that, inside an hour or more, we’ll have seen him prove the truth of this. I’ll give you a ring in a little while.”

Ruggles went out, putting his automatic in his right hand coat pocket.

It was nine fifteen in the evening then. At ten he called me up on the telephone and said that he had arrested Cyril Stanhope, the bacteriologist, for the murder of Richard Grew.

Ruggles said that he had been trying to get Dr. Spaulding on the wire, but had not succeeded and now wanted me to go at once to Spaulding’s office, the address of which he gave me, and tell Spaulding that Stanhope was under arrest. To this, Ruggles added:

“Stanhope is ill. Tell Spaulding that and say I want him to prescribe for Stanhope; I’ll have Stanhope at our apartment by a quarter of eleven. I want Spaulding to see him before I surrender Stanhope to the police — tell Spaulding that, too.

“Now jump into a taxi and beat it down to Spaulding’s apartment, tell him, then beat it out to the taxi and have him rush you to 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street — 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street. Write down the number. Now step on it!”

Sure that I had received Ruggles’s extraordinary statement correctly, and yet scarcely able to believe it, I took a taxi at once to Dr. Spaulding’s apartment, the address of which Ruggles had given me.

The family doctor heard me through without a word. Then he said, looking at me with that concentrated intentness which had impressed me so disagreeably at our first meeting:

“I have nothing to say, Mr. Crane. I have no reason to attempt to pass judgment on the wisdom or the unwisdom of what Mr. Ruggles and you have done. Do not call me to the witness stand, when Mr. Stanhope is tried for this terrible crime.

“Do not call me, that is, if you can in any way avoid it. My position is delicate. And, for Mr. Stanhope’s sake, though I owe him nothing in this world, do not manufacture evidence to support a conclusion you have jumped at!”

“You do not know Ruggles,” I said a little impatiently.

“That is true,” Dr. Spaulding said with what seemed to me to be just a trace of mockery. “He is said to be the cleverest detective in New York City, but he is a detective for all that, and they’re much alike. Tell Mr. Ruggles, when you report to him, that I shall visit Mr. Stanhope, this evening, at your rooms, in my professional capacity.”

The family doctor walked with me through the doorway, and as I went down the steps thanked me for coming.

I could not make him out, and I knew it. Great capacity, there was in him, for both good and ill — it was just a question which would be uppermost. I had believed him guilty of the murder of Richard Grew. I now believed him capable of anything.

I walked along until I could stop a taxi, then told the driver to make his best speed to 61 West Seventy-Sixth Street, arriving in a few moments.

Ruggles had told me he would be waiting for me, and he was, dragging me through the open front door of the house, closing and locking it after him, then saying guardedly:

“Now up those stairs quickly. He’ll be here any moment! We’ve no time to lose!” Ruggles turned on his flash light and bounded up the stairs past me.

I followed him, finding myself soon in what seemed to be a small storeroom at the back of the house. Then I knew where we were: in the laboratory of Cyril Stanhope, the bacteriologist, who had used his scientific knowledge to such desperate ends.

For, all about, neatly arranged and carefully labeled were glass jars of bacteria and cultures — enough, it seemed, to sweep the great city about us with a thousand different devastating plagues.

“See this one?” Ruggles asked, pointing to the label. “Amazon fever germs.” Tapping it, Ruggles said evenly: “Probably a thousand of them, Dan, kept in the best health and ready to be started on their errand of death at any time.”

I stepped back from that terrible jar, saying huskily: “Whose private inferno is this? Stanhope’s?”

“Of course. But don’t look at that door; we’re not going away yet. Get behind those portières over there!” He thrust me swiftly behind them, saying: “I’ve cut holes for us to look through.” Then, as he followed me behind them: “Now don’t move or make a sound!” He turned off his flash light.

In that jetty darkness we waited... waited... waited, scarcely breathing. The atmosphere had the moist, disagreeable warmth of a greenhouse, and I shuddered at the thought of the innumerable deadly agents with which that silent room was tenanted.

Then, when it seemed to me that my nerves must snap under the ever-increasing tension, I heard the sound of swift feet on the stairs up which Ruggles and I had come, the door was thrown open, there was the hard, dazzling glare of a flash light which slit the inky blackness, and some one came swiftly in.

It was a man, from the weight of his step, and the sound was that of a man’s hard breathing. Through the holes Ruggles had cut in the portières which now hid us, I saw the flash light sweep the row of jars nearest us, then come to a stop on the one labeled “Amazon fever germs.”

The man laid the flash light on the table at such an angle that its light played full on that jar; next he took off the cover of the jar, and poured some of its contents into a bottle. Then he replaced the cover of the jar, put it back in its place and snatched up the flash light.

As he did so, there was a crisp click, and the electric glare from a single, high-powered bulb near the door showed clear as day every detail of the room and Dr. Spaulding standing there motionless, in one hand his flash light and in the other the small bottle which he had just filled from the jar.

For one instant he stood there like a man turned to stone, then, so swiftly that my eyes could hardly follow it, he shattered the electric bulb with the first jar he could reach. Darkness fell like a pall, and we heard his desperate rush down the stairs toward the street.

“Out of this room on the double-quick,” Ruggles whispered, “for there’s no knowing what was in that jar. All of them are open, as a matter of fact, for they are alive and must have air to live; but the germs are kept in by the thinnest of gauze; this jar he has broken is all over the place now, though. Here’s the window!”

In a moment, Ruggles had it up and we were drawing in deep breaths of the sweet night air.

“No fire escape,” Ruggles said; “but we’re only on the second floor. Catch my feet.” We were sitting on the window sill. “And I’ll lower myself until I’m hanging by my hands, then you can drop, and here’s hoping you find something soft to land on!”

I did — soft turf, for a wonder; the house was one of the very old ones with a fringe of grass still there along the side — turf softer than ever for the recent rain. I called guardedly up to Ruggles, and in a moment he was standing by my side.

“Now to our rooms,” he said. “Spaulding will go there at once, and we must beat him to it lest he be suspicious of us.”

Chapter VIII Grim Moments

Ruggles led the way swiftly to where he had parked our car, round the next corner. “He has only a moment’s start of us and hasn’t had time yet to catch a taxicab; I’ll bet he’s hurrying along the sidewalk cursing like a wild man, under that cold, collected exterior of his.

“I phoned Mrs. Watts not to let any one in, even the President of the United States, until you and I had got in through the back of the house, so we’re O. K.”

As he drove swiftly along, Ruggles went on with the exclamation I had hoped was coming: “Spaulding is wild with anxiety now and will suspect any one of turning on that electric bulb, there by the door — may even suspect you or me of doing it.”

“As a matter of fact, you did do it, didn’t you?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ruggles said. “That was one of the things I had to do, when I went out, this evening: connect up, with Stanhope’s help, that electric light bulb with a wire and a switch I could turn on from behind the portières.

“Here’s our street. We’ll run the car round to the tradesmen’s entrance at the back, and in that way.”

“Has any one telephoned?” Ruggles asked, when we were standing in our living room.

“No,” a man’s voice called quickly.

“That’s good,” Ruggles said. “Come, Dan, it’s time you met Mr. Cyril Stanhope.”

Ruggles led me into our extra bedroom and up to the bed on which lay a man in his late twenties, a man light-haired, blue-eyed, and handsome, ordinarily of fine strength, but now wan-looking, weak, and haggard.

“This is Mr. Crane,” Ruggles said, “who assists me in all my cases. I’ve told you about him.” Ruggles turned the light full on Stanhope’s face, then nodded, saying: “You’ll do very well, Mr. Stanhope; but if you’re really to look ill enough to fool Dr. Spaulding, you’ll have to have a little more—”

Ruggles broke off abruptly, left the room, and in a moment was back with his makeup box open.

“I ought to make you look another ten pounds under weight,” he said critically, “and I’m going to do it.”

He did, with that extraordinary skill of his — grease paint, powder, and the shadows deepened under the eyes and cheek bones.

Then Ruggles suddenly closed his makeup box, and looked earnestly down at Stanhope, saying:

“I must warn you again that what is coming will put you in the most serious danger. Spaulding is desperate now. I have told you that I am sure he killed Richard Grew, and I am certain that he is about to try to kill you.

“From the moment he enters this room, Crane and I will have him covered; but, in order to carry out the plan I outlined to you — to perfect our evidence against him, we must let him go to your side and examine you, and he may have a knife ready.”

“I know that,” Stanhope said steadily, “but I am going through with it.”

“Prepare yourself, then,” Ruggles said in a tense whisper, as our front doorbell rang. “The time for the final show-down has come. Have your gun ready, Dan! Do not shoot except as a last resort; but then shoot to kill!”

Stanhope extended both his hands. Ruggles snapped a pair of handcuffs on Stanhope’s wrists. Then Ruggles, his face more grave and anxious than I had ever seen it, went to our front door, opened it, end admitted Dr. Spaulding.

In he came, bowing to us with that cold, collected, impassive manner of which Ruggles had spoken; and it struck me then that a great actor had been lost to the world of drama when Dr. Spaulding adopted the profession of medicine.

Or his may have been the medical man’s professional calm.

He laid his hat on a chair, took off his gloves, then the light overcoat he wore, and lifted his doctor’s bag from where he had first put it, on the floor, to our center table.

“You have called me in to prescribe for your patient,” he said in a colorless voice. “Is he—”

“I will show you,” Ruggles said. Then, diffidently and in a whisper, “You said that you knew Mr. Stanhope?”

“Yes,” Dr. Spaulding replied.

Ruggles came a step nearer and said in a still lower whisper:

“Perhaps I might better have called in another doctor — under the circumstances, you may not find attendance on Mr. Stanhope — agreeable?”

“It will not be agreeable to either him or me,” Spaulding said. “On the other hand, please remember, both of us are men of the world; furthermore, I am attending him only in my professional capacity. He knew you were calling me in, did he not? And did he oppose it?”

“A prisoner,” Ruggles said, “is not in a position to oppose much of anything. But he did not express himself against your coming.”

“Then,” Spaulding replied, “I see no objection.” He took up his medical case, and Ruggles led the way into the bedroom.

They were both men of the world, as Spaulding had said, but their self-control was not the same; or it may have been their difference in temperament. Young Stanhope’s face went a fiery red as their eyes met, but no color showed in the face of the family doctor — only his eyes changed: a glaze seemed to have come over them, and behind that strange glaze they glowed cold and cruel as a snake’s eyes.

Spaulding went to Stanhope’s side and said: “What seems to be wrong with you, Stanhope?”

“I do — not — know,” the younger man said, clearing his throat and speaking huskily. “I have no strength, for some — reason, and something seems to be pressing on me — here.” He lifted both hands from under the bedclothes, and his handcuffed hands went to his forehead.

“Any fever, do you think?” Spaulding asked. “Let me—”

Spaulding took no notice of the handcuffs on the man he hated so. The family doctor said nothing.

But another did: the front door, which Ruggles had not closed, was thrown open, and Margaret Grew cried:

“Cyril? Cyril?”

“Here,” young Stanhope cried hoarsely. “Here, Margaret.”

Ruggles signaled to me to bar the door of the bedroom, but she passed me in a flash and in an instant was kneeling beside the bed.

She must have seen Dr. Spaulding, but she did not speak to him; she had no thought or consciousness of any one but the man she loved.

Chapter IX The Last Act

“Cyril,” she cried brokenly, holding him with her arms, “why are you here? You look so ill. It frightens me! Are you—” Her voice broke, then, into a gasping cry of horror, as, for the first time, she became aware of the handcuffs on her lover’s wrists.

She sprang up then and faced us like a tigress. “Take them off! Take them off!” she cried over and over. “Take them off!”

“That cannot be done,” Ruggles said evenly. “I am sorry to have to tell you that he is under — arrest.”

“I do not care,” she shrieked. She tore at them with her soft hands.

“Margaret,” young Stanhope said weakly, “you cannot—”

A look of ghastly realization came over her face; she swayed, caught at the air for support, then, before any of us could catch her, fell fainting across the foot of the bed.

“It is nervous exhaustion only,” Dr. Spaulding said after a swift examination. His set face now was white as chalk. “Like you, Stanhope, she needs only something to make her sleep. I’ll leave you something.”

Spaulding was making every effort to steady himself back into the professional calm. He looked fixedly at his successful rival. “May I ask how long it is since you have eaten anything?”

“Nothing to-day or yesterday,” Stanhope said. “I have been too desperate.”

“You must eat, for all that,” Spaulding said. “I am going to give you both something now. Mr. Ruggles, may I have two cups and some milk, and some hot water?”

“The kitchenette,” Ruggles said, “is right in through that door. You will find milk in the ice box; there is a saucepan on the gas stove — I will show you — and cups on the shelf in the pantry.”

“Thanks, I can find them,” Spaulding said. “I shall be only a moment.” He left us, the pantry door swinging to behind him.

After a few moments he returned, bringing two cups of milky substance, handed one to Margaret and the other he held to Stanhope’s lips.

“Drink it,” he said quietly. “It will—”

But Ruggles snatched the two cups, handed them to me, and then turned like a flash on Spaulding, saying:

“Up with your hands! Those are the last doses of poison you will ever try to give!” He sprang at Spaulding.

But the family doctor darted aside and drew an automatic with which he instantly covered Ruggles.

“You trapped me,” Spaulding said hoarsely, “and you are right about the stuff in that milk: there are germs there like those I gave to Richard Grew. But you have caught me too late!”

Still covering Ruggles and me with his automatic, Spaulding swiftly took from an inner pocket a small glass phial, with his teeth tore off the gauze which had covered the phial’s top, then scattered the dustlike contents in the air.

“For God’s sake,” Stanhope cried, “open a window, Mr. Ruggles.”

“Quite correct,” Spaulding said with grisly composure, “as Mr. Ruggles is about to see demonstrated — for no one is going to open a window. You did that with the gas I shot in through your keyhole, Mr. Detective, but you will not have a chance to in this case. I will shoot to death any one who makes such a move.”

Ruggles dove at Spaulding’s feet. The family doctor’s bullet went high. Before he could fire again, Ruggles jerked from under Spaulding’s feet the small rug he stood on, throwing Spaulding off his balance and making him drop his gun.

Before Spaulding could recover it, Ruggles had snatched it up and tossed it to me, crying: “Open every window and the front door!” Then he sprang in again at Spaulding.

I let in the fresh air, then turned just in time to see Spaulding meet Ruggles’s rush with a crashing blow from a blackjack. As Ruggles reeled back, I brought my gun up, but Ruggles cried:

“Don’t, Dan; I’m going to take this fiend alive!” Then Ruggles was in again; this time he evaded the swing of the blackjack and with a left hook knocked Spaulding unconscious.

“And that’s the end of the family doctor,” Ruggles said when, ten minutes later, Ruggles had turned Spaulding, now conscious, over to the police, and Stanhope, his handcuffs off and his face clean of the paint and powder, had left to take Margaret Grew to her home. “Stanhope did admirably — a fine, brave chap; and Miss Grew did precisely what I had told her to.”

“Why did you bring her in that way?” I asked. “She certainly made it realistic, but—”

“That was what I was after,” Ruggles said. “Spaulding had to be made desperate, by seeing Margaret’s love for Stanhope — then Spaulding revealed himself in his true colors. He would have done it anyway, I guess; but having her there made it sure.”

“But why did you tell me that you had arrested Stanhope for the murder of Richard Grew, ask me to tell that to Spaulding, and tell Spaulding to come here to prescribe for Stanhope’s illness?”

“It was all a plant,” Ruggles said. “It was this way: As soon as you told Spaulding that Stanhope was under arrest in my custody, Spaulding knew that the coast was clear — being under arrest and with me, Stanhope could not be at his rooms; that meant that Spaulding could go to Stanhope’s rooms and get more of the germs.

“My adding that I wanted Spaulding to prescribe, as a doctor, for Stanhope made Spaulding see a chance to administer the germs to Stanhope immediately, and this double-headed chance was more than Spaulding could resist.”

“But why did he try to kill Margaret Grew, when he loved her?”

“He knew he could not have her himself and he meant that no other man should have her. He walked into the trap the whole way.”

“One more question,” I said. “When did you first suspect Spaulding? Was it when we first saw his adoration of Margaret Grew?”

“No, before that,” Ruggles said. “It was in our talk with Richard Grew — he said, you remember, that he believed he was stricken with a fatal illness. I asked him if I should not call in his family doctor, and he replied in the most emphatic negative.

“That set me thinking that he believed the worst of his family doctor, whoever that man was. He said, then, that, though we could do nothing for him, we must save his daughter. There is one thing, Dan, which we never shall know all about, but my guess is this: Richard Grew had found, in Spaulding’s past life, some reason to believe that Spaulding was capable of using his medical knowledge to poison one who became his enemy.

“It may have been some slip Spaulding had made in his talk at some time or other; be that as it may. Grew, though, had never forgotten it, and it came up in his mind when, after receiving that threatening, indeed hideous letter, he soon began to feel ill. The letter said, you remember:

“That meant, to Grew, that Spaulding had sent fatal germs to him, and Grew was absolutely right.”

The telephone rang. I started to answer it, but Ruggles took the call. It was from the police, stating that Dr. Spaulding had just died in his cell!

“I expected that,” Ruggles said quietly. “Whatever was in that phial, it was strong enough to kill him, even the little of it he got into his mouth when he tore off the gauze on its top with his teeth.”