Part 25 (1/2)

”I have another plan,” he said, watching her intently. ”Miss Wallace, it was too much to ask you to come down here. You are ill.”

She was indeed quite pale, as if the excitement had been an overexertion.

”No, indeed,” she persisted. Then, feeling her own weakness, she moved toward the door of Denison's office where there was a leather couch.

”Let me rest here a moment. I do feel queer. I--”

She would have fallen if he had not sprung forward and caught her as she sank to the floor, overcome by the exertion.

Together we carried her in to the couch, and as we did so the comb from her hair clattered to the floor.

Craig threw open the window, and bathed her face with water until there was a faint flutter of the eyelids.

”Walter,” he said, as she began to revive, ”I leave her to you. Keep her quiet for a few moments. She has unintentionally given me just the opportunity I want.”

While she was yet hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness on the couch, he had unwrapped the package which he had brought with him.

For a moment he held the comb which she had dropped near the radioscope. With a low exclamation of surprise he shoved it into his pocket.

Then from the package he drew a heavy piece of apparatus which looked as if it might be the motor part of an electric fan, only in place of the fan he fitted a long, slim, vicious-looking steel bit. A flexible wire attached the thing to the electric light circuit and I knew that it was an electric drill. With his coat off he tugged at the little radium safe until he had moved it out, then dropped on his knees behind it and switched the current on in the electric drill.

It was a tedious process to drill through the steel of the outer casing of the safe and it was getting late. I shut the door to the office so that Miss Wallace could not see.

At last by the cessation of the low hum of the boring, I knew that he had struck the inner lead lining. Quietly I opened the door and stepped out. He was injecting something from an hermetically sealed lead tube into the opening he had made and allowing it to run between the two linings of lead and steel. Then using the tube itself he sealed the opening he had made and dabbed a little black over it.

Quickly he shoved the safe back, then around it concealed several small coils with wires also concealed and leading out through a window to a court.

”We'll catch the fellow this time,” he remarked as he worked. ”If you ever have any idea, Walter, of going into the burglary business, it would be well to ascertain if the safes have any of these little selenium cells as suggested by my friend, Mr. Hammer, the inventor. For by them an alarm can be given miles away the moment an intruder's bull's-eye falls on a hidden cell sensitive to light.”

While I was delegated to take Miss Wallace home, Kennedy made arrangements with a small shopkeeper on the ground floor of a building that backed up on the court for the use of his back room that night, and had already set up a bell actuated by a system of relays which the weak current from the selenium cells could operate.

It was not until nearly midnight that he was ready to leave the laboratory again, where he had been busily engaged in studying the tortoisesh.e.l.l comb which Miss Wallace in her weakness had forgotten.

The little shopkeeper let us in sleepily and Kennedy deposited a large round package on a chair in the back of the shop, as well as a long piece of rubber tubing. Nothing had happened so far.

As we waited the shopkeeper, now wide awake and not at all unconvinced that we were bent on some criminal operation, hung around. Kennedy did not seem to care. He drew from his pocket a little s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s instrument in a lead case, which looked like an abbreviated microscope.

”Look through it,” he said, handing it to me.

I looked and could see thousands of minute sparks.

”What is it?” I asked.

”A spinthariscope. In that it is possible to watch the bombardment of the countless little corpuscles thrown off by radium, as they strike on the zinc blende crystal which forms the base. When radium was originally discovered, the interest was merely in its curious properties, its power to emit invisible rays which penetrated solid substances and rendered things fluorescent, of expending energy without apparent loss.

”Then came the discovery,” he went on, ”of its curative powers. But the first results were not convincing. Still, now that we know the reasons why radium may be dangerous and how to protect ourselves against them we know we possess one of the most wonderful of curative agencies.”

I was thinking rather of the dangers than of the beneficence of radium just now, but Kennedy continued.

”It has cured many malignant growths that seemed hopeless, brought back destroyed cells, exercised good effects in diseases of the liver and intestines and even the baffling diseases of the arteries. The reason why harm, at first, as well as good came, is now understood. Radium emits, as I told you before, three kinds of rays, the alpha, beta, and gamma rays, each with different properties. The emanation is another matter. It does not concern us in this case, as you will see.”

Fascinated as I was by the mystery of the case, I began to see that he was gradually arriving at an explanation which had baffled everyone else.