“Walter,” said Kennedy, as soon as we had reached the street. “I want to get in touch with Halsey Haughton. How can it be done?”
I could think of nothing better at that moment than to inquire at the Star’s Wall Street office, which happened to be around the corner. I knew the men down there intimately, and a few minutes later we were whisked up in the elevator to the office.
They were as glad to see me as I was to see them, for the story of the robbery had interested the financial district perhaps more than any other.
“Where can I find Halsey Haughton at this hour?” I asked.
“Say,” exclaimed one of the men, “what’s the matter? There have been all kinds of rumors in the Street about him to-day. Did you know he was ill?”
“No,” I answered. “Where is he?”
“Out at the home of his fiancee, who is the daughter of Mrs. Courtney Woods, at Glenclair.”
“What’s the matter?” I persisted.
“That’s just it. No one seems to know. They say—well—they say he has a cancer.”
Halsey Haughton suffering from cancer? It was such an uncommon thing to hear of a young man that I looked up quickly in surprise. Then all at once it flashed over me that Denison and Kennedy had discussed the matter of burns from the stolen radium. Might not this be, instead of cancer, a radium burn?