"Isn't there some way you can save him, Professor Kennedy? You must come out to Briar Lake."
When a handsome woman like Mrs. Fraser Ferris pleads, she is irresistible. Not only that, but the story which she had not trusted either to a message or a messenger was deeply interesting, for, already, it had set agog the fashionable country house colony.
Mrs. Ferris had come to us not as the social leader now, but as a mother. Only the night before her son, young Fraser, had been arrested by the local authorities at Briar Lake on the charge of homicide. I had read the meager dispatch in the morning papers and had wondered what the whole story might be.
"You see, Professor Kennedy," she began in an agitated voice as soon as she arrived at the laboratory and introduced herself to us, "day before yesterday, Fraser was boxing at the Country Club with another young man, Irving Evans."
Kennedy nodded. Both of them were well known. Ferris had been the All-America tackle on the University football team a couple of years previous and Evans was a crack pitcher several years before.
"Irving," she continued, adding, "of course I call him Irving, for his mother and I were schoolgirls together—Irving, I believe, fell unconscious during the bout. I'm telling you just what Fraser told me.
"The other men in the Club gymnasium at the time carried him into the locker-room and there they all did what they could to revive him. They succeeded finally, but when he regained consciousness he complained of a burning sensation in his stomach, or, rather, as Fraser says, just below the point where his ribs come together. They say, too, that there was a red spot on his skin, about the size of a half-dollar.
"Finally," she continued with a sigh, "the other men took Irving home—but he lapsed into a half-comatose condition. He never got better. He—he died the next day—yesterday."
It was evidently a great effort for Mrs. Ferris to talk of the affair which had involved her son, but she had made up her mind to face the necessity and was going through it bravely.
"Of course," she resumed a moment later, "the death of Irving Evans caused a great deal of talking. It was natural in a community like Briar Lake. But I don't think anything would have been thought about it, out of the way, if the afternoon after his death—yesterday—the body of one of the Club's stewards, Benson, had not been found jammed into a trunk. Apparently, it had been dumped off an automobile in one of the most lonely sections of the country.