the hint that many messages were being transmitted by wireless, secretly perhaps, from the Haytien. I wanted to read those messages that were being flashed so quietly and secretly through the air. How could it be done? I managed to install down at the dock an apparatus known as the capillary electrometer. By the use of this almost unimaginably delicate instrument I was able to drag down literally out of the air the secrets that seemed so well hidden from all except those for whom they were intended. Listen."
He took the roll of paper from the drum and ran his finger along it hastily, translating to himself the Morse code as he passed from one point to another.
"Here," cried Craig excitedly. "'Leon out of way for time safely. Revolution suppressed before Forsythe can make other arrangements. Conspiracy frustrated.' Just a moment. Here's another. 'Have engaged bridal suite at Hotel La Coste. Communicate with me there after tomorrow.'"
Still holding the wireless record, Kennedy swung about to Burke and myself. "Burke, stand over by the door," he shouted. "Walter—that tank of oxygen, please."
I dragged over the heavy tank which he had ordered as he adjusted a sort of pulmotor breathing apparatus over Leon. Then I dropped back to my place beside Collette, as the oxygen hissed out.
Castine was now on his knees, his aged arms outstretched.
"Before God, Mr. Kennedy—I didn't do it. I didn't give Leon the poison!"
Kennedy, however, engrossed in what he was doing, paid no attention to the appeal.
Suddenly I saw what might have been a faint tremor of an eyelid on the pallid body before us.
I felt Collette spring forward from my side.
"He lives! He lives!" she cried, falling on her knees before the still cataleptic form. "Guillaume!"
There was just a faint movement of the lips, as though as the man came back from another world he would have called, "Collette!"
"Seize that man—it is his name signed to the wireless messages!" shouted Kennedy, extending his accusing forefinger at Aux Cayes, who had plotted so devilishly to use his voodoo knowledge both to suppress the revolution and at the same time to win his beautiful ward for himself from her real lover.
Chapter XXXIV
The Evil Eye
"You don't know the woman who is causing the trouble. You haven't seen her eyes. But—Madre de Dios!—my father is a changed man. Sometimes I think he is—what you call—mad!"
Our visitor spoke in a hurried, nervous tone, with a marked foreign accent which was not at all unpleasing. She was a young woman, unmistakably beautiful, of the dark Spanish type and apparently a South American.
"I am Señorita Inez de Mendoza of Lima, Peru," she introduced herself, as she leaned forward in her chair in a high state of overwrought excitement. "We have been in this country only a short time—my father and I, with his partner in a mining venture, Mr. Lockwood. Since the hot weather came we have been staying at the Beach Inn at Atlantic Beach."
She paused a moment and hesitated, as though in this strange land of the north she had no idea of which way to turn for help.
"Perhaps I should have gone to see a doctor about him," she considered, doubtfully; then her emotions got the better of her and she went on passionately, "but, Mr. Kennedy it is not a case for a doctor. It is a case for a detective—for someone who is more than a detective."
She spoke pleadingly now, in a soft musical voice that was far more pleasing to the ear than that of the usual Spanish-American. I had heard that the women of Lima were famed for their beauty and melodious voices. Señorita Mendoza surely upheld their reputation.
There was an appealing look in her soft brown eyes and her thin, delicate lips trembled as she hurried on with her strange story.
"I never saw my father in such a state before," she murmured. "All he talks about is the 'big fish'—whatever that may mean—and the curse of Mansiche. At times his eyes are staring wide open. Sometimes I think he has a violent fever. He is excited—and seems to be wasting away. He seems to see strange visions and hear voices. Yet I think he is worse when he is quiet in a dark room alone than when he is down in the lobby of the hotel in the midst of the crowd."
A sudden flash of fire seemed to light up her dark eyes. "There is a woman at the hotel, too," she went on, "a woman from Truxillo, Señora de Moche. Ever since she has been there my father has been growing worse and worse."
"Who is this Señora de Moche?" asked Kennedy, studying the Señorita as if she were under a lens.
"A Peruvian of an old Indian family," she replied. "She has come to New York with her son, Alfonso, who is studying at the University here. I knew him in Peru," she added, as if by way of confession, "when he was a student at the University of Lima."
There was something in both her tone and her manner that would lead one to believe that she bore no enmity toward the son—indeed quite the contrary—whatever might be her feelings toward the mother of de Moche.
Kennedy reached for our university catalogue and found the name, Alfonso de Moche, a post-graduate student in the School of Engineering, and therefore not in any of Kennedy's own courses. I could see that Craig was growing more and more interested.
"And you think," he queried, "that in some way this woman is connected with the strange change that has taken place in your father?"
"I don't know," she temporized, but the tone of her answer was sufficient to convey the impression that in her heart she did suspect something, she knew not what.
"It's not a long run to Atlantic Beach," considered Kennedy. "I have one or two things that I must finish up first, however."
"Then you will come down tonight?" she asked, as Kennedy rose and took the little white silk gloved hand which she extended.
"Tonight surely," answered Craig, holding the door for her to pass out.
"Well," I said, when we were alone, "what is it—a romance or a crime?"
"Both, I think," he replied abstractedly, taking up the experiment which the visit had interrupted.
"I think," he remarked late in the afternoon, as he threw off his acid-stained smock, "that I will go over to the University library before it closes and refresh my mind on some of those old Peruvian antiquities and traditions. The big fish or peje grande, as I remember it, was the name given by the natives to one of the greatest buried treasures about the time of Pizarro's conquest. If I remember correctly, Mansiche was the great cacique, or something of that sort—the ruler in northern Peru at that time. He is said to have left a curse on any native who ever divulged the whereabouts of the treasure and the curse was also to fall on any Spaniard who might discover it."
For more than an hour Kennedy delved into the archeological lore in the library. Then he rejoined me at the laboratory and after a hasty bite of dinner we hurried down to the station.
That evening we stepped off the train at Atlantic Beach to make our way to the Beach Inn. The resort was just springing into
