XVI
THE BLOOD TEST
We arrived late at night, or rather in the morning, but in spite of thelate hour Kennedy was up early urging me to help him carry the stuffover to Cushing's laboratory. By the middle of the morning he was readyand had me scouring about town collecting his audience, which consistedof the Winslows, Borland and Lathrop, Dr. Howe, Dr. Harris, Strong andmyself. The laboratory was darkened and Kennedy took his place besidean electric moving picture apparatus.
The first picture was different from anything any of us had ever seenon a screen before. It seemed to be a mass of little dancing globules."This," explained Kennedy, "is what you would call an educationalmoving picture, I suppose. It shows normal blood corpuscles as they arein motion in the blood of a healthy man. Those little round cells arethe red corpuscles and the larger irregular cells are the whitecorpuscles."
He stopped the film. The next picture was a sort of enlarged andelongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrowbody, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of apair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well knowntse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite somethinglike a horse-fly and is a perfect blood-sucker. Vast territories ofthickly populated, fertile country near the shores of lakes and riversare now depopulated as a result of the death-dealing bite of theseflies, more deadly than the blood-sucking, vampirish ghosts with which,in the middle ages, people supposed night air to be inhabited. For thisfly carries with it germs which it leaves in the blood of its victims,which I shall show next."
A new film started.
"Here is a picture of some blood so infected. Notice that worm-likesheath of undulating membrane terminating in a slender whip-likeprocess by which it moves about. That thing wriggling about like aminute electric eel, always in motion, is known as the trypanosome.
"Isn't this a marvellous picture? To see the micro-organism move,evolve and revolve in the midst of normal cells, uncoil and undulate inthe fluids which they inhabit, to see them play hide and seek with theblood corpuscles and clumps of fibrin, turn, twist, and rotate as if ina cage, to see these deadly little trypanosomes moving back and forthin every direction displaying their delicate undulating membranes andshoving aside the blood cells that are in their way while by their sidethe leucocytes, or white corpuscles, lazily extend or retract theirpseudopods of protoplasm. To see all this as it is shown before us hereis to realise that we are in the presence of an unknown world, a worldinfinitesimally small, but as real and as complex as that about us.With the cinematograph and the ultra-microscope we can see what noother forms of photography can reproduce.
"I have secured these pictures so that I can better mass up theevidence against a certain person in this room. For in the blood of oneof you is now going on the fight which you have here seen portrayed bythe picture machine. Notice how the blood corpuscles in this infectedblood have lost their smooth, glossy appearance, become granular andincapable of nourishing the tissues. The trypanosomes are fighting withthe normal blood cells. Here we have the lowest group of animal life,the protozoa, at work killing the highest, man."
Kennedy needed nothing more than the breathless stillness to convincehim of the effectiveness of his method of presenting his case.
"Now," he resumed, "let us leave this blood-sucking, vampirish tse-tsefly for the moment. I have another revelation to make."
He laid down on the table under the lights, which now flashed up again,the little hollow silver cylinder.
"This little instrument," Kennedy explained, "which I have here isknown as a canula, a little canal, for leading off blood from the veinsof one person to another--in other words, blood transfusion. Moderndoctors are proving themselves quite successful in its use.
"Of course, like everything, it has its own peculiar dangers. But theone point I wish to make is this: In the selection of a donor fortransfusion, people fall into definite groups. Tests of blood must bemade first to see whether it 'agglutinates,' and in this respect thereare four classes of persons. In our case this matter had to beneglected. For, gentlemen, there were two kinds of blood on thatlaboratory floor, and they do not agglutinate. This, in short, was whatactually happened. An attempt was made to transfuse Cushing's blood asdonor to another person as recipient. A man suffering from the diseasecaught from the bite of the tse-tse fly--the deadly sleeping sicknessso well known in Africa--has deliberately tried a form of robbery whichI believe to be without parallel. He has stolen the blood of another!
"He stole it in a desperate attempt to stay an incurable disease. Thisman had used an arsenic compound called atoxyl, till his blood wasfilled with it and its effects on the trypanosomes nil. There was butone wild experiment more to try--the stolen blood of another."
Craig paused to let the horror of the crime sink into our minds.
"Some one in the party which went to look over the concession in theCongo contracted the sleeping sickness from the bites of thoseblood-sucking flies. That person has now reached the stage of insanity,and his blood is full of the germs and overloaded with atoxyl.
"Everything had been tried and had failed. He was doomed. He saw hisfortune menaced by the discovery of the way to make synthetic rubber.Life and money were at stake. One night, nerved up by a fit of insanefury, with a power far beyond what one would expect in his ordinaryweakened condition, he saw a light in Cushing's laboratory. He stole instealthily. He seized the inventor with his momentarily superhumanstrength and choked him. As they struggled he must have shoved a spongesoaked with ether and orange essence under his nose. Cushing went under.
"Resistance overcome by the anesthetic, he dragged the now insensibleform to the work bench. Frantically he must have worked. He made anincision and exposed the radial artery, the pulse. Then he must haveadministered a local anesthetic to himself in his arm or leg. Hesecured a vein and pushed the cut end over this little canula. Then hefitted the artery of Cushing over that and the blood that was, perhaps,to save his life began flowing into his depleted veins.
"Who was this madman? I have watched the actions of those whom Isuspected when they did not know they were being watched. I did it byusing this neat little device which looks like a field glass, but isreally a camera that takes pictures of things at right angles to thedirection in which the glass seems to be pointed. One person, I found,had a wound on his leg, the wrapping of which he adjusted nervouslywhen he thought no one was looking. He had difficulty in limping even ashort distance to open a window."
Kennedy uncorked a bottle and the subtle odor of oranges mingled withether stole through the room.
"Some one here will recognize that odour immediately. It is the neworange-essence vapour anesthetic, a mixture of essence of orange withether and chloroform. The odour hidden by the orange which lingered inthe laboratory, Mr. Winslow and Mr. Strong, was not isoprene, butreally ether.
"I am letting some of the odour escape here because in this verylaboratory it was that the thing took place, and it is one of thewell-known principles of psychology that odours are powerfullysuggestive. In this case the odour now must suggest the terrible sceneof the other night to some one before me. More than that, I have totell that person that the blood transfusion did not and could not savehim. His illness is due to a condition that is incurable and cannot bealtered by transfusion of new blood. That person is just as doomedto-day as he was before he committed--"
A figure was groping blindly about. The arsenic compounds with whichhis blood was surcharged had brought on one of the attacks of blindnessto which users of the drug are subject. In his insane frenzy he wasevidently reaching desperately for Kennedy himself. As he groped helimped painfully from the soreness of his wound.
"Dr. Harris," accused Kennedy, avoiding the mad rush at himself, andspeaking in a tone that thrilled us, "you are the man who sucked theblood of Cushing into your own veins and left him to die. But the statewill never be able to exact from you the penalty of your crime. Naturewill do that too soon for jus
tice. Gentlemen, this is the murderer ofBradley Cushing, a maniac, a modern scientific vampire."
I regarded the broken, doomed man with mingled pity and loathing,rather than with the usual feelings one has toward a criminal.
"Come," said Craig. "The local authorities can take care of this casenow."
He paused just long enough for a word of comfort to the poor,broken-hearted girl. Both Winslow answered with a mute look ofgratitude and despair. In fact, in the confusion we were only too gladto escape any more such mournful congratulations.
"Well," Craig remarked, as we walked quickly down the street, "if wehave to wait here for a train, I prefer to wait in the railroadstation. I have done my part. Now my only interest is to get awaybefore they either offer me a banquet or lynch me."
Actually, I think he would have preferred the novelty of dealing with alynching party, if he had had to choose between the two.
We caught a train soon, however, and fortunately it had a dinerattached. Kennedy whiled away the time between courses by reading thegraft exposures in the city.
As we rolled into the station late in the afternoon, he tossed asidethe paper with an air of relief.
"Now for a quiet evening in the laboratory," he exclaimed, almostgleefully.
By what stretch of imagination he could call that recreation, I couldnot see. But as for quietness, I needed it, too. I had fallen wofullybehind in my record of the startling events through which he wasconducting me. Consequently, until late that night I pecked away at mytypewriter trying to get order out of the chaos of my hastily scribblednotes. Under ordinary circumstances, I remembered, the morrow wouldhave been my day of rest on the Star. I had gone far enough withKennedy to realise that on this assignment there was no such thing asrest.
"District Attorney Carton wants to see me immediately at the CriminalCourts Building, Walter," announced Kennedy, early the followingmorning.
Clothed, and as much in my right mind as possible after the arduousliterary labours of the night before, I needed no urging, for Cartonwas an old friend of all the newspaper men. I joined Craig quickly in ahasty ride down-town in the rush hour.
On the table before the square-jawed, close-cropped, fightingprosecutor, whom I knew already after many a long and hard-foughtcampaign both before and after election, lay a little package which hadevidently come to him in the morning's mail by parcel-post.
"What do you suppose is in that, Kennedy?" he asked, tapping itgingerly. "I haven't opened it yet, but I think it's a bomb. Wait--I'llhave a pail of water sent in here so that you can open it, if you will.You understand such things."
"No--no," hastened Kennedy, "that's exactly the wrong thing to do. Someof these modern chemical bombs are set off in precisely that way. No.Let me dissect the thing carefully. I think you may be right. It doeslook as if it might be an infernal machine. You see the evidentdisguise of the roughly written address?"
Carton nodded, for it was that that had excited his suspicion in thefirst place. Meanwhile, Kennedy, without further ceremony, begancarefully to remove the wrapper of brown Manila paper, preservingeverything as he did so. Carton and I instinctively backed away.Inside, Craig had disclosed an oblong wooden box.
"I realise that opening a bomb is dangerous business," he pursuedslowly, engrossed in his work and almost oblivious to us, "but I thinkI can take a chance safely with this fellow. The dangerous part is whatmight be called drawing the fangs. No bombs are exactly safe toys tohave around until they are wholly destroyed, and before you can say youhave destroyed one, it is rather a ticklish business to take out thedangerous element."
He had removed the cover in the deftest manner without friction, andseemingly without disturbing the contents in the least. I do notpretend to know how he did it; but the proof was that we could see himstill working from our end of the room.
On the inside of the cover was roughly drawn a skull and cross-bones,showing that the miscreant who sent the thing had at least a sort ofgrim humour. For, where the teeth should have been in the skull wereinnumerable match-heads. Kennedy picked them out with as muchsang-froid as if he were not playing jackstraws with life and death.
Then he removed the explosive itself and the various murderous slugsand bits of metal embedded in it, carefully separating each as if to belabelled "Exhibit A," "B," and so on for a class in bomb dissection.Finally, he studied the sides and bottom of the box.
"Evidence of chlorate-of-potash mixture," Kennedy muttered to himself,still examining the bomb. "The inside was a veritable arsenal--a veryunusual and clever construction."
"My heavens!" breathed Carton. "I would rather go through a campaignagain."