The Blue Lights Part 22

Grace rose, her face white with suffering. "A doctor, quick! He is hurt!

My G.o.d--don't you see? He is hurt!" As she spoke, she fell back, fainting, to the floor.

CHAPTER XII

When Richard Duvall returned to consciousness, an hour later, he lay upon a couch in Mr. Stapleton's library. A doctor, hastily summoned, was bending over him. Mr. Stapleton sat grimly in an arm chair. There was no one else in the room.

"My wife! Is she here?" the detective cried, as he tried to rise.

The doctor pushed him gently back. "Compose yourself, Monsieur," he said in a soothing voice. "You are not badly hurt. Merely stunned for the moment. A slight cut--that is all. You will be quite yourself again in half an hour."

"But my wife!" He gazed eagerly about the room.

"What do you mean, Duvall?" inquired Mr. Stapleton, calmly. "Why do you think your wife is here?"

"A trace of delirium. He will be all right in a few moments. Very usual in such cases," the doctor whispered.

"I heard her voice. She called to me by name, just as that fellow struck me."

"My dear sir, your mind is wandering. Compose yourself, I beg." The doctor attempted to press his patient back upon the pillows.

Duvall pa.s.sed his hand over his forehead, completely bewildered. "I could have sworn I heard her voice," he cried.

"It was Miss Goncourt, the young woman from the Prefecture, that you heard, Duvall," remarked Mr. Stapleton quietly. He did not tell the detective that Grace, on recovering from her faint, and learning from the doctor that Richard's wound was a superficial one only, and not at all serious, had sworn them both to secrecy, on the plea that the matter was a purely private one, and likely to cause her great unhappiness if divulged. Mr. Stapleton had agreed, but had done so only upon her agreeing not to acquaint the police with his plans for the following night.

She had suddenly conceived a violent animosity toward these fellows who had not only baffled both her husband and herself, but had made the former a victim of a dangerous a.s.sault. She was determined to go to work in desperate earnest, to capture them, or locate the child, before the following evening. She had promised Mr. Stapleton not to acquaint Monsieur Lefevre with the plan for returning the child which the man with the black beard had proposed. The situation put her on her mettle.

She determined to get at the bottom of the whole affair before another twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed. Upon leaving the house she called a taxicab, and at once ordered the chauffeur to drive her to the point on the Versailles road where, according to Valentin, she had been placed in the automobile after her interview with the kidnappers. Here, she believed, lay the starting point of the whole mysterious affair.

Duvall, his consciousness returning, insisted upon getting up from the couch, and going to work with equal determination. The way in which he had been checkmated, in the whole affair, roused him, as well, to desperation. His professional skill, upon which the banker had set such great store, seemed to have deserted him. He felt humiliated, ashamed.

In three days, he had accomplished nothing whatever. It was galling in the extreme.

Mr. Stapleton's explanations of his hallucination regarding his wife he accepted as true. The resemblance which Miss Goncourt bore to Grace, together with his constant thoughts of her, were, he argued, no doubt responsible for it. The blow upon the head made his recollections of the moments immediately preceding and following the a.s.sault extremely hazy.

He put the matter out of his mind, and set to work with renewed energy.

So far, it seemed, he had met with but a single clue of any importance,--the cigarette with the gold tip which he had found in the Bois de Boulogne. He determined to follow this clue until he arrived at some definite result.

As soon as the doctor had departed after dressing the wound in his head, Duvall took a stiff drink of brandy, and, sitting down with Mr.

Stapleton at the latter's desk, began to reconstruct, as far as he could, all the details of the kidnapping. He spoke his thoughts aloud, taking Mr. Stapleton into his confidence, since in this way he could most readily get his ideas into concrete form.

"Mr. Stapleton, I am, I confess, greatly humiliated at the progress, or lack of progress, which I have made in this case so far. I have made up my mind, however, to get these fellows, if it takes me the rest of the summer."

"You will have to work more quickly than that, Mr. Duvall," observed the banker coldly. "I have made arrangements to recover my child by tomorrow night."

"You are going to buy these rascals off, then?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I decline to say. I've had enough interference with my plans already.

Neither you nor the police have accomplished anything. Miss Goncourt knows what I propose to do; but she has given me her word not to interfere. If you are to accomplish anything, it must be before eight o'clock tomorrow night."

"Very well. I will make my plans accordingly."

"What do you propose to do?"

"That I cannot say, at the moment. I think, however, that I shall first try to find out who it is that smokes these gold-tipped cigarettes." He drew the fragment of cigarette which he had found from his pocket, and placing it on the desk before him regarded it critically.

Mr. Stapleton gave a grunt. "What are they, Exquisites?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

The banker laughed. "Easy enough. My wife smokes them."

The detective looked up quickly. "Indeed! Brings them from America with her, I suppose."

"Yes."

Duvall began mentally to check off, in his mind, the various persons who might have used the cigarette which lay before him. Valentin, he now believed, was out of the question. His presence in the automobile, with Grace, the night before, indicated that he had nothing to do with the kidnappers.

There remained Mrs. Stapleton. Duvall had talked with her--seen her grief. He was too shrewd a judge of human nature to think for a moment that it was a.s.sumed.

Who else? Suddenly an idea flashed into his mind. He wondered that he had not thought of it before. The nurse! He recalled vividly the marks he had observed on the dresser in the woman's room in New York.

"Is Mary Lanahan in the house?" he inquired of Stapleton.

"Yes. Why?"

"Kindly have her come here."

Mr. Stapleton pressed a b.u.t.ton on his desk in silence. In a few moments, the nurse had been brought to the room by one of the other servants. She was haggard with grief and fear.

Duvall requested her to be seated, and began to ask her a number of apparently unimportant questions regarding the kidnapping.

She answered them frankly enough, although it was clear that she was very ill at ease.

Presently Duvall got up, and, calling Mr. Stapleton to one side, asked him, in a low tone, to detain the nurse in the library for a few moments. He wished to search her room.

"But it has already been thoroughly searched by the police."

"I know. But I must search it again. It will require but a few moments."

Stapleton nodded. "I will wait for you here, Mr. Duvall," he said.

"Mary, you will wait, as well."

The nurse's room was on the third floor, in a rear building. Duvall found it, after some slight difficulty, with the a.s.sistance of one of the other servants.