Arthur B. Reeve Crime & Mystery Boxed Set - Arthur B. Reeve

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she spoke it was impossible to tell what had happened, but the ambulance surgeon had found a little red mark on her white forearm and had pointed it out, evidently with the idea that she was suffering from a drug.

      At the mere sight of the mark, Blair stared as though hypnotized. Leaning over to Kennedy, so that the others could not hear, he whispered, "It is the mark of the serpent!"

      Our arrival had been announced to the hospital physician, who entered and stood for a moment looking at the patient.

      "I think it is a drug--a poison," he said meditatively.

      "You haven't found out yet what it is, then?" asked Craig.

      The physician shook his head doubtfully. "Whatever it is," he said slowly, "it is closely allied to the cyanide groups in its rapacious activity. I haven't the slightest idea of its true nature, but it seems to have a powerful affinity for important nerve centers of respiration and muscular coordination, as well as for disorganizing the blood. I should say that it produces death by respiratory paralysis and convulsions. To my mind it is an exact, though perhaps less active, counterpart of hydrocyanic acid."

      Kennedy had been listening intently at the start, but before the physician had finished he had bent over and made a ligature quickly with his handkerchief.

      Then he dispatched a messenger with a note. Next he cut about the minute wound on her arm until the blood flowed, cupping it to increase the flow. Now and then he had them administer a little stimulant.

      He had worked rapidly, while Blair watched him with a sort of fascination.

      "Get Dr. Vaughn," ordered Craig, as soon as he had a breathing spell after his quick work, adding, "and Professor and Madame Rapport. Walter, attend to that, will you? I think you will find an officer outside. You'll have to compel them to come, if they won't come otherwise," he added, giving the address of the Lodge, as we had found it.

      Blair shot a quick look at him, as though Craig in his knowledge were uncanny. Apparently, the address had been a secret which he thought we did not know.

      I managed to find an officer and dispatch him for the Rapports. A hospital orderly, I thought, would serve to get Dr. Vaughn.

      Chapter XXIV

      The Serpent's Tooth

       Table of Contents

      I had scarcely returned to the ward when, suddenly, an unnatural strength seemed to be infused into Veda.

      She had risen in bed.

      "It shall not catch me!" she cried in a new paroxysm of nameless terror. "No--no--it is pursuing me. I am never out of its grasp. I have been thought six feet underground--I know it. There it is again--still driving me--still driving me!

      "Will it never stop? Will no one stop it? Save me! It--is the death thought!"

      She had risen convulsively and had drawn back in abject, cowering terror. What was it she saw? Evidently it was very real and very awful. It pursued her relentlessly.

      As she lay there, rolling her eyes about, she caught sight of us and recognized us for the first time, although she had been calling for us.

      "They had the thought on you, too, Professor Kennedy," she almost screamed. "Hour after hour, Rapport and the rest repeated over and over again, 'Why does not some one kill him? Why does he not die?' They knew you--even when I brought you to the Red Lodge. They thought you were a spy."

      I turned to Kennedy. He had advanced and was leaning over to catch every word. Blair was standing behind me and she had not seen her husband yet. A quick glance showed me that he was trembling from head to foot like a leaf, as though he, too, were pursued by the nameless terror.

      "What did they do?" Kennedy asked in a low tone.

      Fearfully, gripping the bars of the iron bed, as though they were some tangible support for her mind, she answered: "They would get together. 'Now, all of you,' they said, 'unite yourselves in thought against our enemy, against Kennedy, that he must leave off persecuting us. He is ripe for destruction!'"

      Kennedy glanced sidewise at me, with a significant look.

      "God grant," she implored, "that none haunt me for what I have done in my ignorance!"

      Just then the door opened and my messenger entered, accompanied by Dr. Vaughn.

      I had turned to catch the expression on Blair's face just in time. It was a look of abject appeal.

      Before Dr. Vaughn could ask a question, or fairly take in the situation, Kennedy had faced him.

      "What was the purpose of all that elaborate mummery out at the Red Lodge?" asked Kennedy pointblank.

      I think I looked at Craig in no less amazement than Vaughn. In spite of the dramatic scenes through which we had passed, the spell of the occult had not fallen on him for an instant.

      "Mummery?" repeated Dr. Vaughn, bending his penetrating eyes on Kennedy, as if he would force him to betray himself first.

      "Yes," reiterated Craig. "You know as well as I do that it has been said that it is a well-established fact that the world wants to be deceived and is willing to pay for the privilege."

      Dr. Vaughn still gazed from one to the other of us defiantly.

      "You know what I mean," persisted Kennedy, "the mumbo-jumbo--just as the Haitian obi man sticks pins in a doll or melts a wax figure of his enemy. That is supposed to be an outward sign. But back of this terrible power that people believe moves in darkness and mystery is something tangible--something real."

      Dr. Vaughn looked up sharply at him, I think mistaking Kennedy's meaning. If he did, all doubt that Kennedy attributed anything to the supernatural was removed as he went on: "At first I had no explanation of the curious events I have just witnessed, and the more I thought about them, the more obscure did they seem.

      "I have tried to reason the thing out," he continued thoughtfully. "Did auto-suggestion, self-hypnotism explain what I have seen? Has Veda Blair been driven almost to death by her own fears only?"

      No one interrupted and he answered his own question. "Somehow the idea that it was purely fear that had driven her on did not satisfy me. As I said, I wanted something more tangible. I could not help thinking that it was not merely subjective. There was something objective, some force at work, something more than psychic in the result achieved by this criminal mental marauder, whoever it is."

      I was following Kennedy's reasoning now closely. As he proceeded, the point that he was making seemed more clear to me.

      Persons of a certain type of mind could be really mentally unbalanced by such methods which we had heard outlined, where the mere fact of another trying to exert power over them became known to them. They would, as a matter of fact, unbalance themselves, thinking about and fighting off imaginary terrors.

      Such people, I could readily see, might be quickly controlled, and in the wake of such control would follow stifled love, wrecked homes, ruined fortunes, suicide and even death.

      Dr. Vaughn leaned forward critically. "What did you conclude, then, was the explanation of what you saw last night?" he asked sharply.

      Kennedy met his question squarely, without flinching. "It looks to me," he replied quietly, "like a sort of hystero-epilepsy. It is well known, I believe, to demonologists--those who have studied this sort of thing. They have recognized the contortions, the screams, the wild, blasphemous talk, the cataleptic rigidity. They are epileptiform."

      Vaughn said nothing, but continued to weigh Kennedy as if in a balance. I, who knew him, knew that it would take a greater than Vaughn to find him wanting, once Kennedy chose to speak. As for Vaughn, was he trying to hide behind some technicality in medical ethics?

      "Dr. Vaughn," continued Craig, as if goading him to the point of breaking down his calm silence, "you are specialist enough

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