Part 13 (2/2)
”It came in the first mail,” she explained. ”I could not wait to send it to you. I brought it myself. What can it mean?”
Kennedy unfolded the paper. Printed in large characters, in every way similar to the four warnings that had been sent to us, was just one ominous line. We read:
”Beware the man who professes to be a friend of your father.”
I glanced from the note to Kennedy, then to Inez. One name was in my mind, and before I knew it I had spoken it.
”Lockwood?” I queried inadvertently.
Her eyes met mine in sharp defiance. ”Impossible,” she exclaimed. ”It is some one trying to injure him with me. Beware of Mr. Lockwood? How absurd!”
Yet it must have meant Lockwood. No one else could have been meant. It was he, most of all, who might be called a friend of her father. She seemed to see the implication without a word from us.
I could not help sympathizing with the brave girl in her struggle between the attack against Lockwood and her love and confidence in him.
It did not need words to tell me that evidence must be overwhelming to convince her that her lover might be involved in any manner.
IX
THE PAPER FIBRES
Kennedy examined the anonymous letter carefully for several minutes, while we watched him in silence.
”Too clever to use a typewriter,” he remarked, still regarding the note through the lens of a hand-gla.s.s. ”Almost any one would have used a machine. That would have been due to the erroneous idea that typewriting cannot be detected. The fact is that the typewriter is perhaps a worse means of concealing ident.i.ty than is disguised handwriting, especially printing like this. It doesn't afford the effective protection to the criminal that one supposes. On the contrary, the typewriting of such a note may be the direct means by which it can be traced to its source. We can determine what kind of machine it was done with, then what particular machine was used can be identified.”
He paused and indicated a number of little instruments which he had taken from a drawer and laid on the table, as he tore off a bit of the corner of the sheet of paper and examined it.
”There is one thing I can do now, though,” he continued. ”I can study the quality of the paper in this sheet. If it were only torn like those warnings we have already received, it might perhaps be mated with another piece as accurately as if the act had been performed before our eyes.”
He picked up a little instrument with a small curved arm and a finely threaded screw that brought the two flat surfaces of the arm and the end of the screw together.
”There is no such good fortune in this case, however,” he resumed, placing the paper between the two small arms. ”But by measurements made by this vernier micrometer caliper I can find the precise thickness of the paper as compared to the other samples.”
He turned to a microscope and placed the corner of the paper under it.
Then he drew from the drawer the four sc.r.a.ps of paper which had already been sent to us, as well as a pile of photographs.
”Under ordinary circ.u.mstances,” he explained, ”I should think that what I am doing would be utterly valueless as a clue to anything. But we are reduced to the minutiae in this affair. And to-day science is not ready to let anything pa.s.s as valueless.”
He continued to look at the various pieces of paper under the microscope. ”I find under microscopic examination,” he went on, addressing Inez, but not looking up from the eye-piece as he s.h.i.+fted the papers, ”that the note you have received, Senorita Mendoza, is written on a rather uncommon linen bond paper. Later I shall take a number of microphotographs of it. I have here, also, about a hundred microphotographs of the fibres in other kinds of paper, many of them bonds. These I have acc.u.mulated from time to time in my study of the subject. None of them, as you can see, shows fibres resembling this one in question, so that we may conclude that it is of uncommon quality.
”Here I have the fibres, also, of four pieces of paper that have already figured in the case. These four correspond, as well as the indentures of the torn edges. As for the fibres, lest you should question the accuracy of the method, I may say that I know of a case where a man in Germany was arrested, charged with stealing a government bond. He was not searched until later. There was no evidence, save that after the arrest a large number of spitb.a.l.l.s were found around the courtyard under his cell window. This method of comparing the fibres of the regular government paper was used, and by it the man was convicted of stealing the bond. I think it is unnecessary to add that in the present case I can see definitely that not only the four pieces of paper that bore warnings to us were the same kind, but that this whole sheet, with its anonymous warning to you, is also the same.”
Inez Mendoza looked at Kennedy as though he possessed some weird power.
Her face, which had already been startled into an expression of fear at his mention of Lockwood, now was pale.
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