For many minutes Kennedy worked over him. I bent down, loosened his collar and shirt, and looked eagerly at his chest for the tell-tale marks of the radium which I felt sure must be there. There was not even a discoloration.
Not a word was said, as Kennedy brought the stupefied little man around.
Denison, pale, shaken, was leaning back now in a big office chair, gasping and holding his head.
Kennedy, before him, reached down into his pocket and handed him the spinthariscope.
“You see that?” he demanded.
Denison looked through the eyepiece.
“Wh—where did you get so much of it?” he asked, a queer look on his face.
“I got that bit of radium from the base of the collar button of Hartley Haughton,” replied Kennedy quietly, “a collar button which some one intimate with him had substituted for his own, bringing that deadly radium with only the minutest protection of a thin strip of metal close to the back of his neck, near the spinal cord and the medulla oblongata which controls blood pressure. That collar button was worse than the poisoned rings of the Borgias. And there is more radium in the pretty gift of a tortoiseshell comb with its paste diamonds which Miss Wallace wore in her hair. Only a fraction of an inch, not enough to cut off the deadly alpha rays, protected the wearers of those articles.”
He paused a moment, while surging through my mind came one after another the explanations of the hitherto inexplicable. Denison seemed almost to cringe in the chair, weak already from the fumes.
“Besides,” went on Kennedy remorselessly, “when I went in there to drag you out, I saw the safe open. I looked. There was nothing in those pretty platinum tubes, as I suspected. European trust—bah! All the cheap devices of a faker with a confederate in London to send a cablegram—and another in New York to send a threatening letter.”