“N-no. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is,” replied Craig, trying to be reassuring. Then, recollecting Betty, he added, “Reginald, go back and tell your sister for me that she must positively make the greatest effort of her life to control herself. Tell her that her mother needs her—needs her well and brave. I shall be up at the house immediately. Do the best you can. I depend on you.”
Kennedy’s words seemed to have a bracing effect on Reginald and a few moments later he left, much calmer.
“I hope I have given him something to do which will keep him from mussing things up again,” remarked Kennedy, mindful of Reginald’s former excursion into detective work.
Meanwhile Craig plunged furiously into his study of the substances he had isolated from the saline solution in which he had “washed” the blood of the little Pekinese.
“There’s no use doing anything in the dark,” he explained. “Until we know what it is we are fighting we can’t very well fight.”
For the moment I was overwhelmed by the impending tragedy that seemed to be hanging over Mrs. Blake. The more I thought of it, the more inexplicable became the discovery of the mold.
“That is all very well about the mold on the gelatine strip in the letter,” I insisted at length. “But, Craig, there must be something wrong somewhere. Mere molds could not have made Buster so ill, and now the infection, or whatever it is, has spread to Mrs. Blake herself. What have you found out by studying Buster?”
He looked up from his close scrutiny of the material in one of the test tubes which contained something he had recovered from the saline solution of the diffusion apparatus.
I could read on his face that whatever it was, it was serious. “What is it?” I repeated almost breathlessly.