The Social Gangster Part 5

"Would you mind meeting him there again this afternoon so that I could see him?" asked Kennedy. "Perhaps it would be best, anyhow, to let him think that you are going to do as he demands, so that we can gain a little time."

She looked up, startled. "Yes--I can do that--but don't you think it is risky? Do you think there is any way I can get free from him? Suppose he makes a new demand. What shall I do? Oh, Professor Kennedy, you do not, you cannot know what I am going through--how I hate and fear him."

"Mrs. Seabury," rea.s.sured Craig earnestly, "I'll take up your case.

Clever as the man is, there must be some way to get at him."

Sherburne must have exercised a sort of fascination over her, for the look of relief that crossed her face as Kennedy promised to aid her was almost painful. As often before, I could scarcely envy Kennedy in his ready a.s.sumption of another's problems that seemed so baffling. It meant little, perhaps, to us whether we succeeded. But to her it meant happiness, perhaps honor itself.

It was as though she were catching at a life line in the swirling current of events that had engulfed her. She hesitated no longer.

"I'll be there--I'll meet him--at four," she murmured, as she rose and made a hurried departure.

For some time after she had gone, Kennedy sat considering what she had told us. As for myself, I cannot say that I was thoroughly satisfied that she had told all. It was not to be expected.

"How do you figure that woman out?" I queried at length.

Kennedy looked at me keenly from under knitted brows. "You mean, do I believe her story--of her relations with this fellow, Sherbourne?" he returned, thoughtfully.

"Exactly," I a.s.sented, "and what she said about her regard for her husband, too."

Kennedy did not reply for a few minutes. Evidently the same question had been in his own mind and he had not reasoned out the answer. Before he could reply the door buzzer sounded and the colored boy from the lower hall handed a card to Craig, with an apology about the house telephone switchboard being out of order.

As Kennedy laid the card on the table before us, with a curt "Show the gentleman in," to the boy, I looked at it in blank amazement.

It read, "Judson Seabury."

Before I could utter a word of comment on the strange coincidence, the husband was sitting in the same chair in which his wife had sat less than half an hour before.

Judson Seabury was a rather distinguished looking man of the solid, business type. Merely to meet his steel gray eye was enough to tell one that this man would brook no rivalry in anything he undertook. I foresaw trouble, even though I could not define its nature.

Craig twirled the card in his fingers, as if to refresh his mind on a name otherwise unfamiliar. I was wondering whether Seabury might not have trailed his wife to our office and have come to demand an explanation. It was with some relief that I found he had not.

"Professor Kennedy," he began nervously, hitching his chair closer, without further introduction, in the manner of a man who was accustomed to having his own way in any matter he undertook, "I am in a most peculiar situation."

Seabury paused a moment, Kennedy nodded acquiescence, and the man suddenly blurted out, "I--I don't know whether I'm being slowly poisoned or not!"

The revelation was startling enough in itself, but doubly so after the interview that had just preceded.

I covered my own surprise by a quick glance at Craig. His face was impa.s.sive as he narrowly searched Seabury's. I knew, though, that back of his a.s.sumed calm, Craig was doing some rapid thinking about the ethics of listening to both parties in the case. However, he said nothing. Indeed, Seabury, once started, hurried on, scarcely giving him a chance to interrupt.

"I may as well tell you," he proceeded, with the air of a man who for the first time is relieving his mind of something that has been weighing heavily on him, "that for some time I have not been exactly--er--easy in my mind about the actions of my wife."

Evidently he had arrived at the conclusion to tell what worried him, and must say it, for he continued immediately: "It's not that I actually know anything about any indiscretions on Agatha's part, but,--well, there have been little things--hints that she was going frequently to _thes dansants_, and that sort of thing, you know. Lately, too, I have seen a change in her manner toward me, I fancy. Sometimes I think she seems to avoid me, especially during the last few days. Then again, as this morning, she seems to be--er--too solicitous."

He pa.s.sed his hand over his forehead, as if to clear it. For once he did not seem to be the self-confident man who had at first entered our apartment. I noticed that he had a peculiar look, a feeble state of the body which he was at times at pains to conceal, a look which the doctors call, I believe, cachectic.

"I mean," he added hastily, as if it might as well be said first as last, "that she seems to be much concerned about my health, my food--"

"Just what is it that you actually know, not what you fear?" interrupted Kennedy, perhaps a little brusquely, at last having seen a chance to insert a word edgewise into the flow of Seabury's troubles, real or imaginary.

Seabury paused a moment, then resumed with a description of his health, which, to tell the truth, was by no means rea.s.suring.

"Well," he answered slowly, "I suffer a good deal from such terrible dyspepsia, Professor Kennedy. My stomach and digestion are all upset--bad health and growing weakness--pain, discomfort--vomiting after meals, even bleeding. I've tried all sorts of cures, but still I can feel that I am still losing health and strength, and, so far, at least, the doctors don't seem to be doing me much good. I have begun to wonder whether it is a case for the doctors, after all. Why, the whole thing is getting on my nerves so that I'm almost afraid to eat," he concluded.

"You have eaten nothing today, then, I am to understand?" asked Craig when Seabury had finished with his minute and puzzling account of his troubles.

"Not even breakfast this morning," he replied. "Mrs. Seabury urged me to eat, but--I--I couldn't."

"Good!" exclaimed Kennedy, much to our surprise. "That will make it just so much easier to use a test I have in mind to determine whether there is anything in your suspicions."

He had risen and gone over to a cabinet.

"Would you mind baring your arm a moment?" he asked Seabury.

With a sharp little instrument, carefully sterilized, Craig p.r.i.c.ked a vein in the man's arm. Slowly a few drops of darkened venous blood welled out. A moment later Kennedy caught them in a sterile test tube and sealed the tube.

Before our second visitor could start again in retailing his suspicions which now seemed definitely, in his own mind at least, directed in some way against Mrs. Seabury, Kennedy skillfully closed the interview.

"I feel sure that the test I shall make will tell me positively, soon, whether your fears are well grounded or not, Mr. Seabury," he concluded briefly, as he accompanied the man out into the hall to shake hands farewell with him at the elevator door. "I'll let you know as soon as anything develops, but until we have something tangible there is no use wasting our energies."

CHAPTER V

THE "THE DANSANT"

I felt, however, that Seabury accepted this conclusion reluctantly, in fact with a sort of mental reservation not to cease activity himself.

The remainder of the forenoon, and for some time during the early afternoon, Craig plunged into one of his periods of intense work and abstraction at the laboratory.

It was, indeed, a most unusual and delicate test which he was making.

For one thing, I noticed that he had, in a sterilizer, some peculiar granular tissue that had been sent to him from a hospital. This tissue he was very careful to cleanse of blood and then by repeated boilings prepare for whatever use he had in mind.

As for myself, I could only stand aside and watch his preparations in silence. Among the many peculiar pieces of apparatus which he had, I recall one that consisted of a gla.s.s cylinder with a siphon tube running into it halfway up the outside. Inside was another, smaller cylinder.

All about him as he proceeded were gla.s.s containers, capillary pipettes, test tubes, Bunsen burners, and dialyzers of porous parchment paper whose wrappers described them as "permeable for peptones, but not for alb.u.mins."

Carefully set aside was the blood which he had drawn from Seabury's veins, allowed to stand till the serum separated out from the clot.

Next he pipetted it into a centrifuge tube and centrifuged it at high speed, some sixteen thousand revolutions, until the serum was perfectly clear, with no trace of a reddish tint, nor even cloudy. After that he drew off the serum into a little tube, covered it with a layer of a substance called toluol from another sterile pipette, and finally placed it in an incubator at a temperature of about ninety-eight.

It was well along toward four o'clock when he paused as if some mental alarm clock had awakened him to another part of the plan of action he had laid out.

"Walter," he remarked, hastily doffing his stained old laboratory coat, "I think we'd better drop around to the Vanderveer."

Curious as I had been at the preparations he was making in the laboratory, I was still glad at even the suggestion of something that my less learned mind could understand and it was not many seconds before we were on our way.

Through the lobby of the famous new hostelry we slowly lounged along, then down a pa.s.sage into the tea room, where, in the center of a circle of quaint little wicker chairs and tables, was a glossy dancing floor.