# Dead Men Tell Tales

Extracted from Everybody's magazine, October 1923, pp. 20-30. Accompanying illustrations by Harold Anderson omitted.
Dead Men Tell Tales
A Craig Kennedy Story
Craig Kennedy Humanitarian and Scientist, Not Only Solves a Criminal Mystery but Renders First Aid in Love and Even Checkmates Death.
By Arthur B. Reeve
“WHAT’S your name?”
“Name?” There was a frightened, hesitating inflection in the woman’s voice. “Name?” she repeated. “I—I don’t know!”
“Well, where do you live?”
“Live? I don’t know!”
Kennedy and I were returning from a week-end at the Jersey shore. Crossing from Staten Island to the Battery, our car was the last one on the ferry. A woman, in wild determination, had rushed out from the women’s cabin, between the lines of cars, stepped over the deck-chain and squeezed through the gate. She then took a couple of steps toward the stern of the boat and stood poised over the seething wake. Kennedy vaulted from the car, slid through the gates and pulled her back.
Shouts and crowding, confusion of passengers in an instant. In it all I saw only one thing: the woman’s eyes—pupils large, lustrous, a glittering pair of eyes like the Ancient Mariner’s. A special officer on the boat pushed through the crowd.
“Don’t know who you are! Don’t know where you live! You don’t know nothin’ at all-uh! That’s what they all say. Well, you’ll have a chance to think it over at the station house. See?” Kennedy interposed. “But it was an attempted suicide, sir,” growled the officer. “I must make an arrest.”
Kennedy became ingratiating.
“It’s amnesia. Now, you didn’t see her do anything; did you, officer? I’ll tell you. You summon the ambulance of the Down-town Hospital, and I’ll take her there in it. What’s the use of making more trouble for her? I should say she’s had enough.”
In the receiving room of the hospital there was still no answer to questions. Search revealed nothing but a bunch of keys. Only those glittering eyes!
Kennedy placed her in an upholstered chair and talked to her very soothingly.
“Don’t fight against me. Let yourself go. Sleep!” Craig’s eyes seemed to penetrate hers. “Rigid!”
She was now plainly in an hypnotic state. Kennedy moved closer a table on which was paper and a pencil. He placed the pencil in her hand.
“Write—now—your name!”
Slowly, in a cramped hand, she scrawled, “Hilda Hildreth.”
“Now—where you live!”
The woman continued writing. “Fifth Avenue.” A number.
“Are these the keys to the house?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
Kennedy pricked under her thumb-nail, squeezed out a couple of drops of blood. Then he snapped his fingers sharply. The woman started—looked about, dazed.
“Put her in a private room where she can be observed, where she has absolute quiet.”
Not many minutes later we pulled up before the number, a house on the Avenue in the Fifties.
I was amazed. I knew this house. This was Fifth Avenue’s house of mystery. Here, surrounded by commerce, lived the wealthy Wagstaff sisters, Anna and Emma, recluses past whom flowed unnoticed the most fashionable throng in America.
The house was boarded up on the first two floors. Kennedy mounted the steps. A small wooden door with a catch-lock was closed.
“Let’s see if the keys really fit.”
He tried one, then another. The third opened the catch-lock of the boarding-door, disclosing the house door, which was open.
As we stepped in we could hear voices—the voices of a girl and a man.
“Let me pass, John—please! These grips are heavy.”
The man was evidently blocking the stairs at the head of the first landing.
“I’m not going to let you pass, Gladys—not with those grips, nor without them unless you promise to let me drive you back quietly to Miss Kent’s School.”
“But——”
“No; I don’t care if Sydney Talcott is waiting at the Little Church. In fact, it is just because Sydney Talcott is waiting that I insist. I think too much of you, my dear. Besides, I am really trustee of the estate. I would be false to my trust if I let such a thing happen. Some day you’ll thank me for having the house watched so closely, for coming up here!”
“But, John, I never have my allowance any more. My aunts don’t take care of me as they used to. I can’t stay at Miss Kent’s with only my tuition and board paid. I’m tired of it. I’m going——”
She flung one bag over his head down the stairs. Then the other rolled down at our feet. There was a struggle.
“Just a moment, please!” Kennedy called up at them.
“Who are you?” demanded a rather prepossessing young man.
“Who are you?”
“I? I’m John Knox Greene, attorney—Greene & Gates, who administer the Wagstaff estate. Come now; who are you? How did you get in?”
“With a key, of course.”
Kennedy displayed the bunch. Gladys gave a gasp. “The key-ring! Why, that’s Hilda’s!”
“Hilda? Who’s Hilda?”
“Hilda Hildreth, the maid my aunts have had for years—even before they began to get so—so—queer.”
“Where are your aunts?”
“They’ve gone to a sanatorium on Staten Island—Galen Sanatorium for Nervous Diseases—to take a treatment.”
GLADYS GOODWIN stood now at the foot of the stairs, holding one bag in front of her with both hands. Feet apart, hat slightly disarranged, scornfully ignoring the attorney who had been doing his best to protect and help her, she studied Craig.
Evidently the information gleaned from the look was satisfactory. Her face relaxed in a smile.
Gladys was about nineteen; slender, of medium height, color intensified by the exertion of the tussle to pass Greene, she stood in an indignant, belligerent attitude which became her.
Her hair was coiled low on her neck, and little stray curls were chasing each other over the whiteness of neck, cheek and forehead. Big blue eyes, scintillating with anger and determination, gave character to a perfectly molded face. But her mouth was made for smiles and kisses. It refused to be drawn in tight, hard lines.
Kennedy was almost fatherly in his handling of her.
“Now, Gladys,” he asked, after a few minutes, “is the telephone connected?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, try it. If it is, please telephone down to the rector of the Little Church that the wedding is postponed—at least for the present. You have your license, of course. You can marry at any time. But think it over. It’s a mighty serious step.”
The telephone proved to be cut off.
“Then I must go down there,” continued Craig. “Greene, I’d prefer to avoid a scene. Let me take her alone. Trust me.
Greene agreed with ill grace.
IN THE rectory of the Little Church we found two men—one young, about the age of Gladys or a year older, the other his senior by perhaps ten years.
The younger, Sydney Talcott, was in a boiling rage at Greene’s interference with the elopement, at Kennedy’s officiousness. There was an ill-concealed resentment on the part of the older brother, Halsey Talcott, too, who growled something about the disappointment of the younger of the old aunts, Emma, who evidently liked Sydney.
“Halsey Talcott,” I repeated to myself. “Are you the architect, sir?”
“Yes.”
I recalled it now. There had been published in the papers an architect’s drawing of a proposed new Art Center on a big block on upper Broadway. The drawing had borne Halsey Talcott’s name, and Halsey Talcott was the chairman of a committee that had promoted the scheme, and was organized to secure the financing.
Then I thought of the old Wagstaff sisters. Among other pieces of property, they still owned what was left of the old Wagstaff farm, on Broadway, a whole block just below Columbus Circle—the block on which it was proposed to erect the great Art Center. The Wagstaff sisters had been reported to have refused persistently to lease the land. And Halsey Talcott was Sydney’s brother!
Kennedy had won Gladys’s confidence—almost. He had won a postponement, but he had one other point to put over—the school.
“But I won’t go back!” she insisted, now that we were alone.
“Well, where will you go? Have you any other relatives?”
“One—a cousin. Mabel Sinclair.”
I had heard of Cousin Mabel Sinclair. She was one of those masterful women. She went in for psychoanalysis and all the other isms of the mind, had capitalized them, set herself up as an “efficiency psychologist of business.”
By dint of sheer persuasive personality, Craig fulfilled his trust. We drove Gladys back to Miss Kent’s school, helped her with her excuses. Then it was that some part of her motive dawned on me. The holidays were coming—cheerless holidays for Gladys.
“But how had that Hilda Hildreth been affected so—and why?” I inquired, when at last we had got to Craig’s laboratory.
Kennedy had lost no time in plunging into a study of the few drops of blood from the maid’s finger.
“A hyoscyamin compound,” he found. “The eyes gave me the first suspicion. It’s a mydriatic alkaloid—like the twilight-sleep. Put an idea into one’s head, awake, the very circumstances, everything is forgotten. But under the drug, in the abnormal state, it seems almost as if consciousness were retained. Yet the person is really another person.” He satisfied himself that his test was correct. “Some reason for this,” he considered. “Now, what?”
Craig telephoned his findings to the doctor at the hospital, and they discussed treatment. Hilda was already better.
“There’s some fraud—some deed of darkness afoot!” I exclaimed, as he hung up.
I had been thinking it over. There was Hilda Hildreth, a victim of amnesia, maid to the eccentric Wagstaff sisters. There was little Gladys Goodwin, one of the heirs—now just a poor little rich girl. There was young Sydney Talcott, with an elder brother, Halsey Talcott, who desired to erect the Art Center on the big block on Broadway owned by the sisters, leasing the land for ninety-nine years. And the sisters would not lease it. I thought I saw.
“Gladys preferred going back to the hated school rather than to her cousin. Now, why?” Kennedy thought a moment. Then, “Let’s look up Mabel Sinclair.”
THE office studio of Mabel Sinclair was in a former hotel on Longacre Square which had been converted into a business building. The door bore her name, and under it was: “Efficiency Psychologist of Business.” Craig paused, and I saw him looking at the next door. On it was; “Halsey Talcott: Architect.”
“Look!” I exclaimed. Next to that was another door, “Art Center Corporation.” Then I noted that all the doors bore the legend: “Tobey’s Sellers of Success.”
Craig opened the door that bore Mabel’s name. It was early afternoon, but she was not there. However, the door into Talcott’s office was open. They were all communicating offices. Talcott was out also. Down the line we could hear voices. That must be Tobey, teaching some agents of “Sellers of Success” how to put it across.
Donald Tobey was a typical promoter, just as breezy in putting over a real-estate proposition in the guise of art as in the promotion of a new moving-picture company or in exploiting an oil-well—provided there was something to sell to the descendants of Barnum’s customers.
Kennedy assumed the rôle of a “prospect,” and was loaded with pamphlets.
“This proposition seems to be sound enough,” he remarked, looking over a handsome prospectus. “But what about the Wagstaff block?”
“Oh, we’re sitting pretty on that.” Tobey smiled confidently. “I suppose you know the story of the Wagstaff family. Well, there were four daughters, no sons. The eldest married Morris Sinclair, the hotel man. There was one child, Mabel.” He nodded toward the office down the line. “The youngest married Parker Goodwin, the publisher. They had one child, a girl, Gladys. The other two sisters, Anna and Emma, disliked their elder sister. But they always liked the youngest. In a joint will, drawn fifteen years or so back, they had left all to this baby, Gladys, cutting off Mabel Sinclair. But about five years ago there was a new will, dividing the estate equally between Mabel and Gladys. Now, these two old aunts are pretty feeble, minds failing rapidly and all that. Miss Sinclair has had to get them to take treatment, but I understand Dr. Putnam—you know Putnam, the great specialist?—says it is only a question of time. Oh, we’ve got it all sewed up.”
So Mabel had been instrumental in getting the aunts to take the Putnam treatment. Mabel Sinclair and Halsey Talcott seemed pretty close, with communicating offices. Then, young Sydney Talcott and Gladys, the other heir, had been all but married that very morning. “Sewed up” and “sitting pretty” seemed right.
Was Mabel Sinclair really a schemer? What of John Knox Greene, of the law firm, Greene & Gates, attorneys for the Wagstaff estate? John was the son of the dead attorney for old Wagstaff. Was John Greene the only person who stood in the way of the scheme?
Outside, Kennedy asked:
“Why has the Broadway property never been used, sold, or leased before?”
“Maybe some cloud on the title,” I hazarded,
It gave Craig an idea. Quickly he evolved a fictitious story of the title to the land that the Art Center wanted—some paper hidden by old Wagstaff in the house, known only to him. He wound up with a hint. Did an old family servant know more than was suspected?
It was my duty to get this story printed in the Star, with the proper display, and I didn’t fail. That night it appeared with a big spread. It was good hot weather news.
“That will smoke them out,” observed Kennedy. “Now, the next step is to get Hilda back, cured, to that sanatorium.”
IT WAS late in the afternoon when we returned to the Down-town Hospital. Hilda was again quite herself, but her mind seemed a complete blank since the night before when she retired.
Hilda’s appreciation of Kennedy’s success in keeping her out of trouble showed itself by her readiness to fall in with his plans. She remembered nothing of the attempted suicide, but she felt deeply grateful that he had saved her life
“Mr. Kennedy,” she murmured, “I am troubled. Always I have been so reliable, But a month ago I don’t know what came over me. I had a spell very much like this. Then it went away. I thought it was my stomach going back on me. But—it is haunting me now, this feeling that I am capable of such foolishness.”
“Never mind, Hilda. Don’t dwell on the past. Watch out for the future.”
On the way to Staten Island she told us interesting things about the women whom she served—their strange and growing aversion to society and modern methods of business and finance.
As we entered the ill-cared-for grounds of the sanatorium, I thought that an air of greater prosperity about the place would have attracted more patients.
An attendant greeted us. He looked sharply at Hilda, but said nothing.
“I want to see the Misses Wagstaff, please.” Craig handed the attendant a card.
“Very sorry,” he replied curtly, hardly looking at his card. “It’s against the rules.”
“Why? This is their personal maid,” argued Kennedy, indicating Hilda.
“Can’t help it. No one can see them until Dr. Putnam comes back.”
Kennedy walked down the steps.
“I don’t suppose it makes any difference if we look about—or do we need Dr. Putnam’s chaperonage for that, too?” he exclaimed sarcastically to us.
We left the porch and walked down the driveway. Near the garage was a splendid view over hill and down valley to the harbor. As we stopped to admire it, we heard, complainingly:
“Well, if he don’t came across soon. I’ll blow this job! My family can’t live on hot air!”
“Same here! Same with everybody, Steve. Owes everybody, too—besides that ’ere mortgage what he always bellyaches about when you touch him for wages——”
The workmen passed out of hearing, but toward the house now could be heard a car.
“Maybe that’s Dr. Putnam,” suggested Hilda, as we followed her.
We cut across a narrow path. As we crossed the porch, we could hear Dr. Putnam talking to the same attendant.
“Where are they now? Gone?”
“I left them here, Doctor. I wouldn’t let them go up.”
“You’re sure they’re not from that confounded lawyer, Greene? They didn’t have any paper, did they?”
“No, Doctor. I tell you the maid, Hilda, was with them.”
“You can’t keep Hilda away from those old folks. She will have to stay.” It was a woman’s voice that broke in.
“Mabel Sinclair!” whispered Hilda to us.
“You did perfectly right in not letting strangers go up-stairs. Always a lot of busybodies snooping round a place like this. If they come back, I’ll manage them.”
“That’s right,” approved Mabel.
I wonder at the apparent intimacy between Mabel and Dr. Putnam. And what about Dr. Putnam’s unconcealed hostility for, perhaps even fear of, young lawyer Greene?
Kennedy coughed, then trod along heavily on the porch. I think none of us showed that we had been eavesdropping.
There were several minutes of parley, but permission was given at last to see the sisters for five minutes.
ANNA and Emma were poor old ladies of the atrophied mid-Victorian period. They were more than just queer. I noticed, too, that either Dr. Putnam or Mabel was in ear-shot all the time.
Anna Wagstaff was the more feeble. Sitting in a big rocker, her frailness was accentuated. Evidently her mind refused to be interested in outside things. She had some wool and knitting-needles, and these she kept busy.
Emma was happy to see Hilda, who tried to make them both more comfortable, adjusting pillows and straightening locks of white hair. Once I saw a glance of keen intelligence pass between Emma and the maid. Had something happened of which Craig and I had not heard?
“How is Gladys?” asked Emma finally.
“Very well, Miss Emma.”
“And Sydney?”
“All right, too, Miss Emma.”
“I’ll be glad to see them again. When did you see Gladys?”
“I didn’t see her. Mr. Kennedy saw her.”
“I should like to have told her how I feel about Sydney. He comes out here to see me once in a while—and I appreciate it—offers to help me, which is strange in young folks these days. He doesn’t wait to be asked.” She looked aside. “I think—if I had met a boy like Sydney when I was as young as Gladys—” She stopped, smiled, glanced at Anna, knitting, then shook her head. The thought of Gladys and Sydney seemed to afford her pleasure.
All this time Anna kept knitting and coughing. It did not seem as if she could last much longer. Dr. Putnam’s information to the promoter seemed correct. Her mind was failing rapidly. Emma was not really so well, either. I gathered that Anna had been the dominant one. Emma was more human. Gladys liked her the better, too.
A telephone call came for the doctor and Craig snapped at the momentary privacy with a hasty question about the joint will.
The sisters made an unintelligible reply, so he turned to Hilda and repeated the question.
“Will?” she returned. “Why, there is a will—an old one, I believe—one they made fifteen years ago. It——”
“But the new one—the one made five years ago?”
Hilda shook her head.
“There is no new will—no will made five years ago.”
Mabel and Dr. Putnam returned. The five minutes were up. We were not destined to get an answer that day.
IT WAS late that night when we returned to our apartment, to find that Gladys had left a letter for Kennedy at the laboratory which had been brought round to our apartment by the caretaker. Kennedy opened it:
Dear Mr. Kennedy:
I fear that some one must want to get everything away from me. I have just received money enough to visit with a friend whose folks have a wonderful estate up in the Berkshires. The vacation starts to-night.
One of the girls had an Evening Star and I read something about a paper maybe hidden in the house. Sydney has warned n)e to keep away from the Fifth Avenue house after John interfered with my runaway match. Is this money to get me out of the way?
Just for that, I’m not going on my vacation—yet.
Gladys Goodwin.
Craig exclaimed:
“She’s just the kind! If she is warned away from a thing, that’s the very thing she wants to do—and does. We go!”
At the old house again, in the middle of the night, we let ourselves in quietly, closed the door—listened.
There was a noise! On rubber soles and on tiptoe we crept to the library. The big safe was open, everything strewn about. We stopped. There were the sounds again. We retraced our way to the reception-room.
Craig flashed his pocket-light. There, on the floor, wriggled Gladys—bound and gagged! He released her.
“Of course I came here, Mr. Kennedy,” she replied to his hurried question. “Who wouldn’t? If you’re young, the thing forbidden is the lure. When everybody, including Sydney, seemed so anxious for me to stay away from my own home, why, that is the time I wanted to go there most. So I came.” She surveyed ruefully the cord and gag Craig had just taken off. “Let me talk. It feels good. My mouth has been held open so long that just to be able to make sounds is a change.”
“I’m giving you a splendid chance, Gladys,” smiled Craig. “Tell me what happened—what you ran into.”
“I don’t know. I came in just as I always did. I wasn’t the least bit particular about keeping quiet. But then I heard some people talking. It sounded like two people in the library. I didn’t go down the hall. I wanted to surprise them. So I crept into the reception-room, then on into the drawing-room. I peeked into the library. But I couldn’t see any one. I saw the safe door open, though, and the desk drawers open, the furniture all moved, books out of the bookcases. It wasn’t right. I went in to see if anything had been taken. I was just going to get up from looking at things when something heavy hit my head—heavy and hard. I didn’t know anything more until I came to in this reception-room. By that time everything was quiet. The burglars must have gone. And here I am with an aching head!”
That was all that night. We put Gladys up at one of the women’s hotels. But in the morning she came to us, this time in dire perplexity. She had gone up to the school, and Sydney had been up there bright and early to see her. Sydney had said that he had word that Aunt Anna was dying, sent to him by Aunt Emma—that Aunt Emma urged her: “Marry Sydney right away. Don’t marry John Greene.”
“And then,” she cried, “already, in my morning mail, there was a letter from John. It told me that there was something mighty suspicious about the Talcotts, Sydney and Halsey—and maybe Mabel, too!” Gladys was evidently frightened. She did not know whether her own heart was telling her truly about Sydney. “Mr. Kennedy,” she appealed, “what shall I do?”
The telephone-bell in the laboratory rang loudly. It was Mabel Sinclair, so excited that I had no chance to tell her who I was.
“Mr. Kennedy,” she cried, “I’ve been the victim of a cruel hoax! Come over, right away, to the sanatorium. … Oh, you’re not Mr. Kennedy? Please—get him! …. Oh—is Gladys there? Tell—Please bring Gladys over, too. Don’t let her come alone! Oh——”
Craig took the receiver, and I thought of the elder aunt who had been getting worse, of the other, for whom Sydney had been doing some service. What did it mean?
Kennedy turned from the telephone. There was no use trying to break the news gently to Gladys by his side. She knew.
“Your Aunt Anna is dead; Aunt Emma is worse—the shock, you know. Hilda is gone again, too.”
Gladys faced him white, startled.
“What shall I do?” she asked helplessly. “Where’s John?”
“Over there. Halsey Talcott is there, too. Call up Sydney. Get him to come over right away. Tell him—oh, tell him you’ll do as your Aunt Emma wants—marry him—anything.” Kennedy scowled as she took the receiver tremulously. “We’ll give Greene his chance to explain that letter.”
Kennedy hustled us out into the car, and we were off.
“Aunt Anna dead; Aunt Emma dying,” repeated Gladys mechanically. “But Mabel—Mabel never seemed to care for me before. It’s strange. What can she want to tell me?”
“She said she wouldn’t dare say over the wire,” replied Kennedy, “that we must hurry over!”
I was thinking as we drove to the ferry of the second attack on the maid, some new peril for poor Hilda. Was the sanatorium really a house of hypnotism? They treated these by suggestion. There is good suggestion; but there is also evil suggestion. I had heard of psychoanalysis driving people to crime.
DR. PUTNAM’S greeting was a bit more affable than when we visited the sanatorium the day before.
“Am I too late, Doctor? Is she still alive? Dear Aunt Emma! Let me go to her right away.” Tears trembled on Gladys’s lashes as she followed the doctor.
We passed the room death had entered, followed the doctor to Aunt Emma’s bedside. It was true; we had barely come in time. Gladys took the thin white hand and held it lovingly.
“Do you know me?”
A poor little smile flitted over the wan, worn face.
“Gladys!” It was just a whisper. The large eyes opened. The dying woman tried to say something. It was too much for her departing strength. “Child—don’t—” There was no more. Aunt Emma lapsed into that blessed unconsciousness preceding the end.
The nurse gently put her arm about Gladys, drew her away a bit.
“What have they done about Hilda?” asked Craig. “Do they know where she went?”
Dr. Putnam shook his head. “She has wandered off somewhere. They are looking for her now.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?”
“Miss Sinclair has gone along the shore one way, Halsey Talcott the other, and Mr. Greene is covering the ferries.”
There were voices in the hall.
“But I must see Miss Goodwin, I tell you! She telephoned me.”
Gladys raised her head at the voice. It was Sydney Talcott. He came forward, took her arm, murmured a few words of sympathy. Gladys hardly knew what to do. She wanted to trust Sydney. But she knew things that had happened in the last few hours that seemed very queer. She strove to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Putnam’s attendant sped down the hall.
“The police—found Hilda—wandering among the hills—south!” he exclaimed. “They’re bringing her in now!”
Halsey Talcott had come in from his unsuccessful search only a few seconds before the police automobile arrived. And now Hilda, in a daze, was led in. Kennedy refused to let any one but him attend her.
“Hilda”—he had settled her quietly in a big chair—“was there another will?”
“Yes. I witnessed it!” She appeared to be almost hypnotized.
“When?”
“A month ago.”
“A month ago!” exclaimed Kennedy. “I thought the will was dated five years ago?” She shook her head. “But a month ago,” insisted Kennedy, “they were incompetent to make a valid will.”
Hilda laughed unnaturally.
“They disliked their eldest sister, the mother of Mabel Sinclair, and cut her off. They liked the youngest sister, the mother of Gladys Goodwin. They gave all to Gladys. Then the will was changed. But it had to be dated five years back to be legal. I was called in. I knew—but—” She went off into another laugh of hollow mockery.
There was the sound of a car outside, and a call for Dr. Putnam. Kennedy followed the doctor. Sydney and I turned from Gladys and Hilda. I felt sorry for Gladys. Here were those who had mothered her from baby days passing out; Hilda, who had loved her, also failing; a lover of whom she was now uncertain. It was staggering for the girl. She followed Craig pitifully. It seemed as if she had matured unnaturally in the last two days.
“Hello, Doc! I couldn’t find her. She hasn’t been on any ferry. Is Talcott back? Or Mabel?” John Greene did not wait for an answer. “Where shall I go next?”
Kennedy interrupted.
“In there. The police found her and brought her back.”
“Good! How is she?”
“All right physically. Spinning, mentally.”
“What ails everybody? How is Miss Emma?”
“Sinking rapidly now,” interposed Dr. Putnam.
Greene caught sight of Sydney’s face.
“What’s the matter with you, Sydney? You don’t look pleased to see me. Thinking about that interrupted wedding?” He paused. “What else could I do in my position? I couldn’t see a little girl with two dying aunts, the heiress to millions, rush headlong into an elopement.” He jerked his head with a smile toward Kennedy. “There’s your man; he stopped the wedding, really. Gladys wouldn’t have listened to me.”
“Well, you started it. You won’t interrupt the next one.”
Greene seemed to grip himself.
“Don’t you think,” he said quietly, “you could pick a better time and place for a fight, Talcott?”
Sydney did not answer, but his face flushed. Before the encounter could get out of hand, the telephone bell rang. Craig took the call before Putnam could get to it.
“It’s from the county hospital,” he said, facing us as he set the instrument down. “Mabel Sinclair is dead—drowned—in the bay. The hospital had a call from a drug store down there for an ambulance and sent a pulmotor. Come; we had better all go.”
It was almost too much for Gladys.
“Then we shall never know what it was Mabel was going to tell!” she exclaimed. “Mr. Kennedy,” she murmured, as we all piled into the cars, “why must all my people go at once? Please hurry. Maybe they can do something with the pulmotor.”
There flashed through my mind only the idea of suicide. Was it confession?
IT WAS not much of a ride, and we drew up before the drug store on the Shore Road where already were the ambulance and the doctor.
The pulmotor had already been used, but it had failed. The young doctor told of massaging the heart.
“But it was useless, too,” he whispered to Kennedy. “She’s dead all right!”
Back of the prescription counter Gladys dropped into a chair. On either side were Greene and Sydney Talcott. She was sobbing violently.
Kennedy was too engrossed to heed them. His thoughts were concentrated on Mabel Sinclair and the questions he was asking about the length of time since she had been found off the old pier.
“Bring me a good syringe and a thin needle, about eight centimeters long,” he nodded to the druggist. “And about a cubic centimeter of a one to one-thousandth solution of epinephrin. I’m depending on the solution to be fresh and potent.”
The druggist handed him a new, long hypodermic needle, then the epinephrin.
“We hear a great deal nowadays about the glands, the endocrine glands,” said Kennedy, proceeding quickly with his sterilizing and antiseptic preparations. “One gland that has a striking influence on the chemical overturn in the body is the central, or medullary, portion of the adrenal. This gland produces a substance which has the extraordinary property of mimicking in the various organs all the changes that are exhibited in great emotional excitement—epinephrin, adrenin, adrenalin, various names for much the same drug.” He bent over the silent, cold form of Mabel.
Craig made a puncture in the fourth intercostal space, about two finger-breadths from the left border of the sternum, a little inward from the left border of the relative heart dulness.
As Craig pushed the needle in, Gladys jumped up quickly with a shrill cry.
“Look! What is he doing? She can’t live now!”
Without looking up, Craig muttered,
“Please—Gladys!”
He pressed down on a plunger, then withdrew the needle carefully, with a nod to the ambulance surgeon.
The young doctor placed his stethoscope on Mabel, passed it to Kennedy. A moment later Kennedy passed it to me.
“Heart-beats!” I exclaimed, awed as if in the presence of a miracle.
Kennedy nodded.
“When this substance is injected into the veins, even in extremely minute amount, it stops the activity of the digestive organs, drives the blood away from the abdomen into the brain, the heart and the muscles. It raises blood-pressure in the arteries, dilates the small bronchioles in the lungs, sets free sugar from the liver, increases clotting of blood, and in the case of muscular fatigue quickly renders the tired muscles capable of responding to a call upon them for more work. Together with the part of the nervous system which springs into action at times of great fear or anger, this medulla of the adrenal—and hence this drug—helps to render the body more efficient in physical struggle, mobilizes the body-forces for special heroic effort during a critical emergency. If it does this when injected into normal veins, what may it not do if injected into the heart itself, even when it has ceased to beat?”
The face of the young surgeon clouded. The heart had stopped.
Calmly Kennedy prepared another injection. Again the heart started. Craig held a small mirror at the nose, the mouth. There was no moisture on the mirror. The lungs were not working. The heart stopped again.
In her excitement, Gladys had forgotten Sydney and Greene. Leaning forward, quiet after Craig’s stern call for silence, she watched—fascinated. She had thrilled at the look of hope on Craig’s face, and fell back disappointed now, when the mirror showed no moisture.
A third time Craig prepared the needle.
“I’d recommend,” he said talking to the young surgeon, “that this method be made widely known and that physicians learn it as part of their training, so that they can perform this operation swiftly and satisfactorily. But you must always remember that the instances when it can be used are rare indeed. If there has been wearing-away of tissues, toxic action by overwhelming doses of bacterial or metallic poisons, destruction of masses of vital organs, it would be cruel and futile to rouse false hopes. That would be gross sensationalism.”
He gave the third injection. Gladys stiffened and held her hands over her face, peeping through her fingers. Her lips moved tremulously. I could see that over and over she was softly breathing a prayer. Halsey Talcott seemed even more distressed. He paced the drug store, back and forth, saying nothing.
“Now try your pulmotor, doctor. Give the lungs just that little start!”
The heart was pulsating now momentarily. The air, the oxygen from the pulmotor caused the chest to rise and fall.
Craig waved gently. The pulmotor was withdrawn. The linings now inflated, deflated. The heart continued beating.
“She is alive!” Gladys was now indulging in a moderate case of hysteria of relief. In her joy she grasped my hand and held it.
Kennedy turned to Hilda, who had been brought aong with us. Her eyes were getting more normal.
“I don’t want her to come out yet!” he exclaimed. Then, to the druggist, “Have you just a little hyoscyamin in the shop?”
A FEW moments later her eyes were dilating again. She seemed to be recollecting what had taken place back at the sanatorium.
“Hilda”—Craig spoke sharply—“now tell me about that will a month ago. You knew the sisters were not competent to make a legal will. Why did you witness it?”
“He made me! I don’t know—I couldn’t help it. I felt strange—the way I do now. I can’t help answering your questions. But I don’t want to. He made me sign it. …”
I saw Dr. Putnam moving slowly toward the door, but Craig did not move. The door had been locked.
Passing her hand wearily over her forehead, Hilda moaned:
“He tried to kill me. I know now. I complained about feeling tired. ‘I’ll have a fine tonic for you to take,’ he said. It all comes back to me now. I felt strange each time and I seemed to forget about it.”
Kennedy had been preparing an antidote. He now gave it to Hilda.
“Don’t worry any more, Hilda. You’ll not need any of that tonic in the future. You know your enemies. That is enough.”
“You dear old Hilda!” Gladys had come over to her. “You’ll come home with me—let me take care of you. You need rest.”
The maid put out her hand.
“It is such a comfort, Miss Gladys, to think I am not going crazy, too.”
Gladys faced Putnam.
“All I know is that I’m sorry my aunts ever spent a night under your roof.”
Putnam, at the locked door, had turned face to face now with Greene.
“You held the mortgage,” he growled. “It was overdue. I did what I had to.”
“What’s your mortgage compared to Hilda’s life?” The cheeks of Gladys were blazing, her eyes snapping.
“Gladys!”
We started. There was an inarticulate cry from Mabel. I looked at her strangely. There was no recollection of another world. She was very much of this world.
She tried to raise herself, tried to point.
“Aunt Emma told me—yes—he did it—first the will, the fake— Then he made me go help him open the safe—search—after that thing in the Star. Gladys, if you would have married him, he would have got rid of me, got all. You wouldn’t!” I saw that Mabel was feebly pointing at John Greene. “But I knew too much—this morning. So did Hilda—about the will!”
Hilda suddenly seemed to break into a saner recollection, as if her two personalities were merging.
“Yes; he made me sign it. Yesterday, with the doctor, he told me to go down to the ferry—jump off. To-day he told me to go to South Beach, out on the pier——”
John Knox Greene was standing with his back to a desk. As Craig’s injections of epinephrin had been taking effect in the dramatic awakening of the dead, Greene had been acquiring a livid, deathly pallor. It seemed almost as if the glow on Mabel’s cheeks was being taken from his own.
“Then, this morning, he didn’t go to the ferry. He went with me—out on the dock—I can’t swim. He shoved me off. If I drowned—it would cover the whole thing.”
“Sydney!” Gladys put out her hand impulsively, a happy smile on her face. “I’m so glad, Sydney—it wasn’t—Halsey!”
Sydney smiled as he drew her to him.
“You know, Gladys, you’re leaning against that license—in my breast-pocket, dear!”
“I need you—Sydney!” She caught sight now of Mabel, lying on the blankets of the stretcher from the ambulance, and dropped on her knees beside her. “Mabel!” She bent over and kissed her forehead. “Mabel, I know the old will stands—but you’re not cut off. That block—I’ll lease it to you. You and Halsey shall build your Art Center!”
In her weakness, Mabel smiled bravely up at Halsey Talcott now, standing beside his brother.
“Greene,” interrupted Craig, “you faked a will, sought to get them all out of the way, first the nurse, then the sisters. You would have married Gladys; if not, you would have taken away half her inheritance, made terms with Mabel—if Mabel had been that kind to make terms. You wanted the girl and the fortune. Well, this needle may have saved you from the chair, but you’ll have a good many years to meditate on other charges!”
The nerves in Greene’s face were twitching violently. His eyes were shifting. He was trying hard to control himself. It seemed strange to me that the man made no futile dash for liberty. Most of them do.
He took his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it over his face, bent forward, a glint of desperation in her eyes.
“You’ve pulled Mabel back—but you’ll have to go—to hell—if you’re going to pull me back!”
He crumpled in a heap on the floor, and I saw that when he had pulled out his handkerchief he had also taken from his pocket a now empty paper of some cyanide powder.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 87 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse