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

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СКАЧАТЬ they say. No—because if there is a war there won't be any government to tax them!"

      The note did not appear to interest Kennedy as much as what he had discovered. "One thing is self-evident, Mr. Brixton," he remarked. "Some one inside this house is spying, is in constant communication with a person or persons outside. All the watchmen and Great Danes on the estate are of no avail against the subtle, underground connection that I believe exists. It is still early in the afternoon. I shall make a hasty trip to New York and return after dinner. I should like to watch with you in the den this evening."

      "Very well," agreed Brixton. "I shall arrange to have you met at the station and brought here as secretly as I can."

      He sighed, as if admitting that he was no longer master of even his own house.

      Kennedy was silent during most of our return trip to New York. As for myself, I was deeply mired in an attempt to fathom Wachtmann. He baffled me. However, I felt that if there was indeed some subtle, underground connection between some one inside and some one outside Brixton's house, Craig would prepare an equally subtle method of meeting it on his own account. Very little was said by either of us on the journey up to the laboratory, or on the return to Woodrock. I realised that there was very little excuse for a commuter not to be well informed. I, at least, had plenty of time to exhaust the newspapers I had bought.

      Whether or not we returned without being observed, I did not know, but at least we did find that the basement and dark storeroom were deserted, as we cautiously made our way again into the corner where Craig had made his enigmatical discoveries of the afternoon.

      While I held a pocket flashlight Craig was busy concealing another instrument of his own in the little storeroom. It seemed to be a little black disk about as big as a watch, with a number of perforated holes in one face. Carelessly he tossed it into the top drawer of the chest under some old rubbish, shut the drawer tight and ran a flexible wire out of the back of the chest. It was a simple matter to lay the wire through some bins next the storeroom and then around to the passageway down to the subterranean den of Brixton. There Craig deposited a little black box about the size of an ordinary kodak.

      For an hour or so we sat with Brixton. Neither of us said anything, and Brixton was uncommunicatively engaged in reading a railroad report. Suddenly a sort of muttering, singing noise seemed to fill the room.

      "There it is!" cried Brixton, clapping the book shut and looking eagerly at Kennedy.

      Gradually the sound increased in pitch. It seemed to come from the ceiling, not from any particular part of the room, but merely from somewhere overhead. There was no hallucination about it. We all heard. As the vibrations increased it was evident that they were shaping themselves into words.

      Kennedy had grasped the black box the moment the sound began and was holding two black rubber disks to his ears.

      At last the sound from overhead became articulate. It was weird, uncanny. Suddenly a voice said distinctly: "Let American dollars beware. They will not protect American daughters."

      Craig had dropped the two ear-pieces and was gazing intently at the Osram lamp in the ceiling. Was he, too, crazy?

      "Here, Mr. Brixton, take these two receivers of the detectaphone," said Kennedy. "Tell me whether you can recognise the voice."

      "Why, it's familiar," he remarked slowly. "I can't place it, but I've heard it before. Where is it? What is this thing, anyhow?"

      "It is some one hidden in the storeroom in the basement," answered Craig. "He is talking into a very sensitive telephone transmitter and—"

      "But the voice—here?" interrupted Brixton impatiently.

      Kennedy pointed to the incandescent lamp in the ceiling. "The incandescent lamp," he said, "is not always the mute electrical apparatus it is supposed to be. Under the right conditions it can be made to speak exactly as the famous 'speaking-arc,' as it was called by Professor Duddell, who investigated it. Both the arc-light and the metal-filament lamp can be made to act as telephone receivers."

      It seemed unbelievable, but Kennedy was positive. "In the case of the speaking-arc or 'arcophone,' as it might be called," he continued, "the fact that the electric arc is sensitive to such small variations in the current over a wide range of frequency has suggested that a direct-current arc might be used as a telephone receiver. All that is necessary is to superimpose a microphone current on the main arc current, and the arc reproduces sounds and speech distinctly, loud enough to be heard several feet. Indeed, the arc could be used as a transmitter, too, if a sensitive receiver replaced the transmitter at the other end. The things needed are an arc-lamp, an impedance coil, or small transformer-coil, a rheostat, and a source of energy. The alternating current is not adapted to reproduce speech, but the ordinary direct current is. Of course, the theory isn't half as simple as the apparatus I have described."

      He had unscrewed the Osram lamp. The talking ceased immediately.

      "Two investigators named Ort and Bidger have used a lamp like this as a receiver," he continued. "They found that words spoken were reproduced in the lamp. The telephonic current variations superposed on the current passing through the lamp produce corresponding variations of heat in the filament, which are radiated to the glass of the bulb, causing it to expand and contract proportionately, and thus transmitting vibrations to the exterior air. Of course, in sixteen- and thirty-two-candle-power lamps the glass is too thick, and the heat variations are too feeble."

      Who was it whose voice Brixton had recognised as familiar over Kennedy's hastily installed detectaphone? Certainly he must have been a scientist of no mean attainment. That did not surprise me, for I realised that from that part of Europe where this mystical Red Brotherhood operated some of the most famous scientists of the world had sprung.

      A hasty excursion into the basement netted us nothing. The place was deserted.

      We could only wait. With parting instructions to Brixton in the use of the detectaphone we said good night, were met by a watchman and escorted as far as the lodge safely.

      Only one remark did Kennedy make as we settled ourselves for the long ride in the accommodation train to the city. "That warning means that we have two people to protect—both Brixton and his daughter."

      Speculate as I might, I could find no answer to the mystery, nor to the question, which was also unsolved, as to the queer malady of Brixton himself, which his physician diagnosed as jaundice.

      Chapter VI

      The Detectaphone

       Table of Contents

      Far after midnight though it had been when we had at last turned in at our apartment, Kennedy was up even earlier than usual in the morning. I found him engrossed in work at the laboratory.

      "Just in time to see whether I'm right in my guess about the illness of Brixton," he remarked, scarcely looking up at me.

      He had taken a flask with a rubber stopper. Through one hole in it was fitted a long funnel; through another ran a glass tube, connecting with a large U-shaped drying-tube filled with calcium chloride, which in turn connected with a long open tube with an up-turned end.

      Into the flask Craig dropped some pure granulated zinc coated with platinum. Then he covered it with dilute sulphuric acid through the funnel tube. "That forms hydrogen gas," he explained, "which passes through СКАЧАТЬ