The War Terror Read online

  CHAPTER V

  THE ULTRA-VIOLET RAY

  "Good Gad, man!" exclaimed Verplanck, who had read it over Craig'sshoulder. "What do you make of THAT?"

  Kennedy merely shook his head. Mrs. Verplanck was the calmest of all.

  "The light," I cried. "You remember the light? Could it have been asignal to some one on this side of the bay, a signal light in thewoods?"

  "Possibly," commented Kennedy absently, adding, "Robbery with thisfellow seems to be an art as carefully strategized as a promoter's planor a merchant's trade campaign. I think I'll run over this morning andsee if there is any trace of anything on the Carter estate."

  Just then the telephone rang insistently. It was McNeill, much excited,though he had not heard of the orange incident. Verplanck answered thecall.

  "Have you heard the news?" asked McNeill. "They report this morningthat that fellow must have turned up last night at Belle Aire."

  "Belle Aire? Why, man, that's fifty miles away and on the other side ofthe island. He was here last night," and Verplanck related briefly thefind of the morning. "No boat could get around the island in that timeand as for a car--those roads are almost impossible at night."

  "Can't help it," returned McNeill doggedly. "The Halstead estate out atBelle Aire was robbed last night. It's spooky all right."

  "Tell McNeill I want to see him--will meet him in the villagedirectly," cut in Craig before Verplanck had finished.

  We bolted a hasty breakfast and in one of Verplanck's cars hurried tomeet McNeill.

  "What do you intend doing?" he asked helplessly, as Kennedy finishedhis recital of the queer doings of the night before.

  "I'm going out now to look around the Carter place. Can you come along?"

  "Surely," agreed McNeill, climbing into the car. "You know him?"

  "No."

  "Then I'll introduce you. Queer chap, Carter. He's a lawyer, although Idon't think he has much practice, except managing his mother's estate."

  McNeill settled back in the luxurious car with an exclamation ofsatisfaction.

  "What do you think of Verplanck?" he asked.

  "He seems to me to be a very public-spirited man," answered Kennedydiscreetly.

  That, however, was not what McNeill meant and he ignored it. And so forthe next ten minutes we were entertained with a little retail scandalof Westport and Bluffwood, including a tale that seemed to have gainedcurrency that Verplanck and Mrs. Hollingsworth were too friendly toplease Mrs. Verplanck. I set the whole thing down to the hostility andjealousy of the towns people who misinterpret everything possible inthe smart set, although I could not help recalling how quickly she hadspoken when we had visited the Hollingsworth house in the Streamlinethe day before.

  Montgomery Carter happened to be at home and, at least openly,interposed no objection to our going about the grounds.

  "You see," explained Kennedy, watching the effect of his words as if tonote whether Carter himself had noticed anything unusual the nightbefore, "we saw a light moving over here last night. To tell the truth,I half expected you would have a story to add to ours, of a secondvisit."

  Carter smiled. "No objection at all. I'm simply nonplussed at the nerveof this fellow, coming back again. I guess you've heard what a narrowsqueak he had with me. You're welcome to go anywhere, just so long asyou don't disturb my study down there in the boathouse. I use thatbecause it overlooks the bay--just the place to study over knotty legalproblems."

  Back of, or in front of the Carter house, according as you fancied itfaced the bay or not, was the boathouse, built by Carter's father, whohad been a great yachtsman in his day and commodore of the club. Hisson had not gone in much for water sports and had converted the cornerunderneath a sort of observation tower into a sort of country lawoffice.

  "There has always seemed to me to be something strange about thatboathouse since the old man died," remarked McNeill in a half whisperas we left Carter. "He always keeps it locked and never lets anyone goin there, although they say he has it fitted beautifully with hundredsof volumes of law books, too."

  Kennedy had been climbing the hill back of the house and now paused tolook about. Below was the Carter garage.

  "By the way," exclaimed McNeill, as if he had at last hit on a greatdiscovery, "Carter has a new chauffeur, a fellow named Wickham. I justsaw him driving down to the village. He's a chap that it might pay usto watch--a newcomer, smart as a steel trap, they say, but not much ofa talker."

  "Suppose you take that job--watch him," encouraged Kennedy. "We can'tknow too much about strangers here, McNeill."

  "That's right," agreed the detective. "I'll follow him back to thevillage and get a line on him."

  "Don't be easily discouraged," added Kennedy, as McNeill started downthe hill to the garage. "If he is a fox he'll try to throw you off thetrail. Hang on."

  "What was that for?" I asked as the detective disappeared. "Did youwant to get rid of him?"

  "Partly," replied Craig, descending slowly, after a long survey of thesurrounding country.

  We had reached the garage, deserted now except for our own car.

  "I'd like to investigate that tower," remarked Kennedy with a keen lookat me, "if it could be done without seeming to violate Mr. Carter'shospitality."

  "Well," I observed, my eye catching a ladder beside the garage,"there's a ladder. We can do no more than try."

  He walked over to the automobile, took a little package out, slipped itinto his pocket, and a few minutes later we had set the ladder upagainst the side of the boathouse farthest away from the house. It wasthe work of only a moment for Kennedy to scale it and prowl across theroof to the tower, while I stood guard at the foot.

  "No one has been up there recently," he panted breathlessly as herejoined me. "There isn't a sign."

  We took the ladder quietly back to the garage, then Kennedy led the waydown the shore to a sort of little summerhouse cut off from theboathouse and garage by the trees, though over the top of a hedge onecould still see the boathouse tower.

  We sat down, and Craig filled his lungs with the good salt air,sweeping his eye about the blue and green panorama as though this werea holiday and not a mystery case.

  "Walter," he said at length, "I wish you'd take the car and go aroundto Verplanck's. I don't think you can see the tower through the trees,but I should like to be sure."

  I found that it could not be seen, though I tried all over the placeand got myself disliked by the gardener and suspected by a watchmanwith a dog.

  It could not have been from the tower of the boathouse that we had seenthe light, and I hurried back to Craig to tell him so. But when Ireturned, I found that he was impatiently pacing the little rusticsummerhouse, no longer interested in what he had sent me to find out.

  "What has happened?" I asked eagerly.

  "Just come out here and I'll show you something," he replied, leavingthe summerhouse and approaching the boathouse from the other side ofthe hedge, on the beach, so that the house itself cut us off fromobservation from Carter's.

  "I fixed a lens on the top of that tower when I was up there," heexplained, pointing up at it. "It must be about fifty feet high. Fromthere, you see, it throws a reflection down to this mirror. I did itbecause through a skylight in the tower I could read whatever waswritten by anyone sitting at Carter's desk in the corner under it."

  "Read?" I repeated, mystified.

  "Yes, by invisible light," he continued. "This invisible lightbusiness, you know, is pretty well understood by this time. I was onlyrepeating what was suggested once by Professor Wood of Johns Hopkins.Practically all sources of light, you understand, give out more or lessultraviolet light, which plays no part in vision whatever. The humaneye is sensitive to but few of the light rays that reach it, and if oureyes were constituted just the least bit differently we should have anentirely different set of images.

  "But by the use of various devices we can, as it were, translate theseultraviolet rays into terms of what the human eye can see. In ord
er todo it, all the visible light rays which show us the thing as we seeit--the tree green, the sky blue--must be cut off. So in taking anultraviolet photograph a screen must be used which will be opaque tothese visible rays and yet will let the ultraviolet rays through toform the image. That gave Professor Wood a lot of trouble. Glass won'tdo, for glass cuts off the ultraviolet rays entirely. Quartz is a verygood medium, but it does not cut off all the visible light. In factthere is only one thing that will do the work, and that is metallicsilver."

  I could not fathom what he was driving at, but the fascination ofKennedy himself was quite sufficient.

  "Silver," he went on, "is all right if the objects can be illuminatedby an electric spark or some other source rich in the rays. But itisn't entirely satisfactory when sunlight is concerned, for variousreasons that I need not bore you with. Professor Wood has worked out aprocess of depositing nickel on glass. That's it up there," heconcluded, wheeling a lower reflector about until it caught the imageof the afternoon sun thrown from the lens on the top of the tower.

  "You see," he resumed, "that upper lens is concave so that it enlargestremendously. I can do some wonderful tricks with that."

  I had been lighting a cigarette and held a box of safety wind matchesin my hand.

  "Give me that matchbox," he asked.

  He placed it at the foot of the tower. Then he went off, I should say,without exaggeration, a hundred feet.

  The lettering on the matchbox could be seen in the silvered mirror,enlarged to such a point that the letters were plainly visible!

  "Think of the possibilities in that," he added excitedly. "I saw themat once. You can read what some one is writing at a desk a hundred,perhaps two hundred feet away."

  "Yes," I cried, more interested in the practical aspects of it than inthe mechanics and optics. "What have you found?"

  "Some one came into the boathouse while you were away," he said. "Hehad a note. It read, 'Those new detectives are watching everything. Wemust have the evidence. You must get those letters to-night, withoutfail.'"

  "Letters--evidence," I repeated. "Who wrote it? Who received it?"

  "I couldn't see over the hedge who had entered the boathouse, and bythe time I got around here he was gone."

  "Was it Wickham--or intended for Wickham?" I asked.

  Kennedy shrugged his shoulders.

  "We'll gain nothing by staying here," he said. "There is just onepossibility in the case, and I can guard against that only by returningto Verplanck's and getting some of that stuff I brought up here withme. Let us go."

  Late in the afternoon though it was, after our return, Kennedy insistedon hurrying from Verplanck's to the Yacht Club up the bay. It was alarge building, extending out into the water on made land, from whichran a long, substantial dock. He had stopped long enough only to askVerplanck to lend him the services of his best mechanician, a Frenchmannamed Armand.

  On the end of the yacht club dock Kennedy and Armand set up a largeaffair which looked like a mortar. I watched curiously, dividing myattention between them and the splendid view of the harbor which theend of the dock commanded on all sides.

  "What is this?" I asked finally. "Fireworks?"

  "A rocket mortar of light weight," explained Kennedy, then dropped intoFrench as he explained to Armand the manipulation of the thing.

  There was a searchlight near by on the dock.

  "You can use that?" queried Kennedy.

  "Oh, yes. Mr. Verplanck, he is vice-commodore of the club. Oh, yes, Ican use that. Why, Monsieur?"

  Kennedy had uncovered a round brass case. It did not seem to amount tomuch, as compared to some of the complicated apparatus he had used. Init was a four-sided prism of glass--I should have said, cut off thecorner of a huge glass cube.

  He handed it to us.

  "Look in it," he said.

  It certainly was about the most curious piece of crystal gazing I hadever done. Turn the thing any way I pleased and I could see my face init, just as in an ordinary mirror.

  "What do you call it?" Armand asked, much interested.

  "A triple mirror," replied Kennedy, and again, half in English and halfin French, neither of which I could follow, he explained the use of themirror to the mechanician.

  We were returning up the dock, leaving Armand with instructions to beat the club at dusk, when we met McNeill, tired and disgusted.

  "What luck?" asked Kennedy.

  "Nothing," he returned. "I had a 'short' shadow and a 'long' shadow atWickham's heels all day. You know what I mean. Instead of one man,two--the second sleuthing in the other's tracks. If he escaped NumberOne, Number Two would take it up, and I was ready to move up intoNumber Two's place. They kept him in sight about all the time. Not afact. But then, of course, we don't know what he was doing before wetook up tailing him. Say," he added, "I have just got word from anagency with which I correspond in New York that it is reported that ayeggman named 'Australia Mac,' a very daring and clever chap, has beenattempting to dispose of some of the goods which we know have beenstolen through one of the worst 'fences' in New York."

  "Is that all?" asked Craig, with the mention of Australia Mac showingthe first real interest yet in anything that McNeill had done since wemet him the night before.

  "All so far. I wired for more details immediately."

  "Do you know anything about this Australia Mac?"

  "Not much. No one does. He's a new man, it seems, to the police here."

  "Be here at eight o'clock, McNeill," said Craig, as we left the clubfor Verplanck's. "If you can find out more about this yeggman, so muchthe better."

  "Have you made any progress?" asked Verplanck as we entered the estatea few minutes later.

  "Yes," returned Craig, telling only enough to whet his interest."There's a clue, as I half expected, from New York, too. But we are sofar away that we'll have to stick to my original plan. You can trustArmand?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Then we shall transfer our activity to the Yacht Club to-night," wasall that Kennedy vouchsafed.