The Treasure-Train Part 25

"Did you observe anything peculiar?" queried Kennedy. "Was there anything that might give you a hint of what had happened?"

Anitra Barrios considered. "Nothing," she replied, slowly, "except that the windows were all closed. There was a peculiar odor in the room. I was so excited over Jose, though, that I couldn't tell you just what it was like."

"What did you do?" inquired Craig.

"What could we do, just two girls, all alone? It was late. The streets were deserted. You know how they are down-town at night. We took him home, to the hotel, in a cab, and called the hotel physician, Doctor Scott."

Both girls were again weeping silently in each other's arms. If there was anything that moved Kennedy to action it was distress of this sort.

Without a word he rose from his desk, and I followed him. Anitra and Eulalie seemed to understand. Though they said nothing, they looked their grat.i.tude as we four left the laboratory.

On the way down to the hotel Anitra continued to pour out her story in a fragmentary way. Her brother and she, it seemed, had inherited from their father a large sugar-plantation in Santa Clara, the middle province of Cuba.

Jose had not been like many of the planters. He had actually taken hold of the plantation, after the revolution had wrecked it, and had re-established it on modern, scientific lines. Now it was one of the largest independent plantations on the island.

To increase its efficiency, he had later established a New York office to look after the sale of the raw sugar and had placed it in charge of a friend, Manuel Sandoval. A month or so before he had come to New York with his sister to sell the plantation, to get the high price that the boom in sugar had made it worth. It was while he had been negotiating for the sale that he had fallen in love with Eulalie and they had become engaged.

Doctor Scott met us in the sitting-room of the suite which Anitra and her brother occupied, and, as she introduced us, with an anxious glance in the direction of the door of the sick-room, he shook his head gravely, though he did his best to seem encouraging.

"It's a case of poisoning of some kind, I fear," he whispered aside to us, at the first opportunity. "But I can't quite make out just what it is."

We followed the doctor into the room. Eulalie had preceded us and had dropped down on her knees by the bed, pa.s.sing her little white hand caressingly over the pale and distorted face of Jose.

He was still unconscious, gasping and fighting for breath, his features pinched and skin cold and clammy. Kennedy examined the stricken man carefully, first feeling his pulse. It was barely perceptible, rapid, thready, and irregular. Now and then there were muscular tremblings and convulsive movements of the limbs. Craig moved over to the side of the room away from the two girls, where Doctor Scott was standing.

"Sometimes," I heard the doctor venture, "I think it is aconite, but the symptoms are not quite the same. Besides, I don't see how it could have been administered. There's no mark on him that might have come from a hypodermic, no wound, not even a scratch. He couldn't have swallowed it. Suicide is out of the question. But his nose and throat are terribly swollen and inflamed. It's beyond me."

I tried to recall other cases I had seen. There was one case of Kennedy's in which several deaths had occurred due to aconite. Was this another of that sort? I felt unqualified to judge, where Doctor Scott himself confessed his inability. Kennedy himself said nothing, and from his face I gathered that even he had no clue as yet.

As we left the sick-room, we found that another visitor had arrived and was standing in the sitting-room. It was Manuel Sandoval.

Sandoval was a handsome fellow, tall, straight as an arrow, with bushy dark hair and a mustache which gave him a distinguished appearance.

Born in Cuba, he had been educated in the United States, had taken special work in the technology of sugar, knew the game from cane to centrifugal and the s.h.i.+p to the sugar trust. He was quite as much a scientist as a business man.

He and Eulalie talked for a moment in low tones in Cuban Spanish, but it needed only to watch his eyes to guess where his heart was. He seemed to fairly devour every move that Anitra made about the apartment.

A few minutes later the door opened again and a striking-looking man entered. He was a bit older than Sandoval, but still young. As he entered he bowed to Sandoval and Eulalie but greeted Anitra warmly.

"Mr. Burton Page," introduced Anitra, turning to us quickly, with just the trace of a flush on her face. "Mr. Page has been putting my brother in touch with people in New York who are interested in Cuban sugar-plantations." A call from Doctor Scott for some help took both girls into the sick-room for a moment.

"Is Barrios any better?" asked Page, turning to Sandoval.

Sandoval shook his head in the negative, but said nothing. One could not help observing that there seemed to be a sort of antipathy between the two, and I saw that Craig was observing them both closely.

Page was a typical, breezy Westerner, who had first drifted to New York as a mining promoter. Prom that he had gone into selling ranches, and, by natural stages, into the promotion of almost anything in the universe.

Sugar being at the time uppermost in the mind of the "Street," Page was naturally to be found crammed with facts about that staple. One could not help being interested in studying a man of his type, as long as one kept his grip on his pocket-book. For he was a veritable pied piper when it came to enticing dollars to follow him, and in his promotions he had the reputation of having ama.s.sed an impressive pile of dollars himself.

No important change in the condition of Barrios had taken place, except that he was a trifle more exhausted, and Doctor Scott administered a stimulant. Kennedy, who was eager to take up the investigation of the case on the outside in the hope of discovering something that might be dignified into being a clue, excused himself, with a nod to Anitra to follow into the hall.

"I may look over the office?" Craig ventured when we were alone with her.

"Surely," she replied, frankly, opening her handbag which was lying on a table near the door. "I have an equal right in the business with my brother. Here are the keys. The office has been closed to-day."

Kennedy took the keys, promising to let her know the moment he discovered anything important, and we hurried directly down-town.

The office of the Barrios Company was at the foot of Wall Street, where the business of importing touched on the financial district. From the window one could see freighters unloading their cargoes at the docks.

In the other direction, capital to the billions was represented. But in all that interesting neighborhood nothing just at present could surpa.s.s the mystery of what had taken place in the lonely little office late the night before.

Kennedy pa.s.sed the rail that shut the outer office off from a sort of reception s.p.a.ce. He glanced about at the safe, the books, papers, and letter-files. It would take an accountant and an investigator days, perhaps weeks, to trace out anything in them, if indeed it were worth while at all.

Two gla.s.s doors opened at one end to two smaller private offices, one belonging evidently to Sandoval, the other to Barrios. What theory Craig formed I could not guess, but as he tiptoed from the hall door, past the rail, to the door of Jose's office, I could see that first of all he was trying to discover whether it was possible to enter the outer office and reach Jose's door unseen and unheard by any one sitting at the desk inside. Apparently it was easily possible, and he paused a moment to consider what good that knowledge might do.

As he did so his eye rested on the floor. A few feet away stood one of the modern "sanitary" desks. In this case the legs of the desk raised the desk high enough from the floor so that one could at least see where the cleaning-woman had left a small pile of unsanitary dust near the wall.

Suddenly Kennedy bent down and poked something out of the pile of dust.

There on the floor was an empty sh.e.l.l of a cartridge. Kennedy picked it up and looked at it curiously.

What did it mean? I recalled that Doctor Scott had particularly said that Barrios had not been wounded.

Still regarding the cartridge sh.e.l.l, Kennedy sat down at the desk of Barrios.

Looking for a piece of paper in which to wrap the sh.e.l.l, he pulled out the middle drawer of the desk. In a back corner was a package of letters, neatly tied. We glanced at them. The envelopes bore the name of Jose Barrios and were in the handwriting of a woman. Some were postmarked Cuba; others, later, New York. Kennedy opened one of them.

I could not restrain an exclamation of astonishment. I had expected that they were from Eulalie Sandoval. But they were signed by a name that we had not heard--Teresa de Leon!

Hastily Kennedy read through the open letter. Its tone seemed to be that of a threat. One sentence I recall was, "I would follow you anywhere--I'll make you want me."

One after another Kennedy ran through them. All were vague and veiled, as though the writer wished by some circ.u.mlocution to convey an idea that would not be apparent to some third, inquisitive party.

What was back of it all? Had Jose been making love to another woman at the same time that he was engaged to Eulalie Sandoval? As far as the contents of the letters went there was nothing to show that he had done anything wrong. The mystery of the "other woman" only served to deepen the mystery of what little we already knew.

Craig dropped the letters into his pocket along with the sh.e.l.l, and walked around into the office of Sandoval. I followed him. Quickly he made a search, but it did not seem to net him anything.

Meanwhile I had been regarding a queer-looking instrument that stood on a flat table against one wall. It seemed to consist of a standard on each end of which was fastened a disk, besides several other arrangements the purpose of which I had not the slightest idea. Between the two ends rested a gla.s.s tube of some liquid. At one end was a lamp; the other was fitted with an eyepiece like a telescope. Beside the instrument on the table lay some more gla.s.s-capped tubes and strewn about were samples of raw sugar.

"It is a saccharimeter," explained Kennedy, also looking at it, "an instrument used to detect the amount of sugar held in solution, a form of the polariscope. We won't go into the science of it now. It's rather abstruse."

He was about to turn back into the outer office when an idea seemed to occur to him. He took the cartridge from his pocket and carefully sc.r.a.ped off what he could of the powder that still adhered to the outer rim. It was just a bit, but he dissolved it in some liquid from a bottle on the table, filled one of the clean gla.s.s tubes, capped the open end, and placed this tube in the saccharimeter where the first one I noticed had been.

Carefully he lighted the lamp, then squinted through the eyepiece at the tube of liquid containing what he had derived from the cartridge.

He made some adjustments, and as he did so his face indicated that at last he began to see something dimly. The saccharimeter had opened the first rift in the haze that surrounded the case.

"I think I know what we have here," he said, briefly, rising and placing the tube and its contents in his pocket with the other things he had discovered. "Of course it is only a hint. This instrument won't tell me finally. But it is worth following up."

With a final glance about to make sure that we had overlooked nothing, Kennedy closed and locked the outside door.

"I'm going directly up to the laboratory, Walter," decided Kennedy.

"Meanwhile you can help me very much if you will look up this Teresa de Leon. I noticed that the New York letters were written on the stationery of the Pan-America Hotel. Get what you can. I leave it to you. And if you can find out anything about the others, so much the better. I'll see you as soon as you finish."