Accordingly, I retraced my steps to the laboratory. Kennedy was still at work, partly over some reactions in test-tubes, but mostly using the strange three-tubed instrument I had noted. As I outlined to him rapidly what I had discovered and the plain inferences to be drawn from it, he listened attentively, still working.
“Very good,” was Kennedy’s sole comment as I concluded my story. “That’s very interesting—possibly very important. It begins to look as though Maddox had been in some one’s way and that that some one was taking no chances in order to ‘get’ him.”
“What have you discovered so far?” I hesitated, not sure yet whether he was willing to talk, for Kennedy never said anything, even to me, until he was perfectly sure of his ground.
“Marshall Maddox was not drowned, at least,” he vouchsafed.
“Not drowned?” I repeated, more to lead him on than because I was surprised.
“No. Whatever was the cause of his death, he was not killed by drowning. The lungs and stomach show that. In fact, I knew at Westport that he might have died a natural death or might even have been a suicide. But he certainly did not die of drowning. Only more careful tests than either the coroner or I could make at Westport were necessary.”
“How did it happen, then?” I continued, emboldened by his apparent readiness to talk.
Kennedy took a bottle with a ground-glass stopper and held it up so that I could see its greenish-yellow contents. Then he pulled out the stopper, covered with vaseline, for an instant and shoved it back again.
The instant was enough. A most unpleasant odor filled the laboratory. I felt a sense of suffocation in the chest, an irritation in the nose and throat, as though by the corrosive action of some gas on the air passages.
“If we could only have seen him before he died,” continued Kennedy, “I suspect we should have found his face as blue as it was when we did see him, his lips violet, his pulse growing weaker until it was imperceptible, and perhaps he would have been raising blood. It would have been like an acute bronchitis, only worse. Look.”