Part 5

“Yes.” She scarcely breathed it.

“How long? To whom?” He was standing over her now; his attitude half menacing. His voice compelled an answer.

“For six months,” she whispered, “the letters have been coming. They said I must pay, or the world would be told of the curse. I could do nothing else. I burned the letters as fast as they came, and I’ve sent fifty thousand dollars to a lock-box in Philadelphia. I had to sell my diamonds, and have them replaced by imitations to make the last payment.”

“My God, what a fool I’ve been!” There was only anguish in the blind man’s voice now. He paced the floor with tigerish strides.

“Do you ever remember cooking the opium pill?” It came like a pistol-shot.

“Cooking----” He gave her no chance to finish.

“Where did you get the headache powders you take?”

“Doctor Grayton gave me the prescription, just before he died. I have never taken any others.”

“How often do you take them?”

“Several times a week. They quiet my nerves. I have been taking them for years, renewing the prescription when necessary.”

“Did you take any on the cruise?”

“Perhaps a dozen. They prevent sea-sickness.”

“You never felt the craving for that two months?”

“Never.”

“They put you to sleep?”

“A light sleep that comes of quieted nerves.” She was answering the questions automatically, staring at him. Her husband listened, lips parted, breath coming fast. Sydney Thames was leaning forward, tense, expectant.

The blind problemist whirled from her and continued his pacing. Twice he made the length of the room.

“The inhuman devils!” they heard him mutter. “God, what devils there are!”

Jimmy Raelton could stand it no longer. “What do you mean?” he cried.

The blind man stopped before him, sightless eyes behind the round, dark glasses apparently staring deep into his. “I mean that my neglect is responsible for this.” There was terrible bitterness in his voice. “_Not a breath of opium smoke has ever passed Dorothy Raelton’s lips!_”

Dumb, stupefied, they could only stare; then, as though moved by hidden springs, the man and woman leaped to their feet. But as quickly as it came the look of hope died in Dorothy Raelton’s eyes. She fell back into the chair.

“Don’t!” she sobbed. “I can’t bear it! I’ve used the horrible stuff a hundred times. I couldn’t fight against it!”

The man still stood, swaying ever so slightly, finger-nails biting into his palms, as his hands clenched convulsively.

Gently the blind man forced him down into his chair. “It is true, Jimmy,” he said, and his voice was normal once more. “I should have known it last night when the whole game was in my hands. Now I must start at the beginning. The mind I have trained for years to be purely eliminative, that I have thought impervious to outside influences, is only human, after all. Last night I believed the evidence of my four senses and did not use my brain.”

Only Sydney Thames realized what this confession cost the man who had so prided himself on his infallibility.

“I don’t understand,” came dully from Jimmy Raelton.

The blind man resumed his pacing of the room. “Dorothy doesn’t even know that the opium pill must be ‘cooked’ over the sweet-oil lamp! She doesn’t know the first thing about opium smoking! And last night there was no key on the inside of the door. _It was locked from the outside!_ I remember distinctly that my fumbling fingers felt no key as I went out. I know--now--that none fell. Someone wanted you”--his finger pointed at Jimmy Raelton--“to see your wife!” He paused for an instant, then continued, rapidly, crisply: “The whole thing is the most devilish blackmail I have ever heard of. It is based on the one thing that all the past dead centuries have taught us to fear--atavism. When Dorothy’s money had gone, and the selling of the necklace stones told the blackmailers so, the husband must be the next victim of the vampire. The scene of last night was arranged so that only a touch would be needed to explode the powder-magazine the reception postponement had started if Jimmy refused to pay. The fiendish simplicity of it!”

“But who----” began Dorothy Raelton, and there was almost eagerness in her voice. Then the hopelessness came back. “But it is impossible. I know----”

“You know nothing! Where is your maid?”

A terrible expression came to Raelton’s face. “The maid! She----” The words came like curses before the problemist stopped him.

“The maid is absolutely innocent! Absolutely! Remember that above all things!” cried Colton. “Where is she?”

“I sent her to mail a letter so that she would be out of the way when we started. I wouldn’t even trust her,” Jimmy Raelton answered slowly.

“To whom was the letter addressed?”

“To you. I didn’t want to come here, but Dorothy insisted.”

“Did you get a letter from the blackmailer this morning?”

Silently Jimmy Raelton took a letter from his pocket and extended it. Colton received it eagerly, jerked out the inclosure, laid it face down on the desk. His hypersensitive finger-tips brushed lightly the reversed, raised words the typewriter keys had driven through the paper as he read aloud slowly:

“_Mr. Raelton._

“SIR,--May be you don’t know it, but your wife smokes hop. If you don’t want the wurld to get wise, send 25 one-thousand-dollar bills to lock-box 117, Philadelphia. Don’t register. We’ll take a chance they land safe. If you’re too up in the air to-day give you till to-morrow, but put a personal in the _Telegram_ saying when. And do it, too!”

The blind man paused an instant, then continued: “The fact that they want the money in thousand-dollar bills proves that the blackmailers are persons who can pass them without question, despite the childish attempt at illiteracy. They also know that the money would arrive safely without registry, which would necessitate signing a receipt. The fact that they want the money sent to a place so easily watched as a public lock-box proves that they have some means of getting their hands on it before it gets there!”

He grasped the telephone. “Six thousand Greeley. _Telegram?_ Take a personal for the next edition. Ready? ‘Lock-box 117. Not even twenty-five cents.--J. R.’ That’s all. On the street in an hour? Charge it to Thornley Colton. Right.”

They listened, white-faced; he shot a question at Dorothy before a protest could be voiced:

“Have you ever called in Doctor Henry?”

“There are things one can’t tell even one’s physician,” she said simply. “Jimmy called him, once, when he thought I was suffering from nervous break-down. Doctor Henry never suspected, couldn’t suspect. He told Jimmy that his plans for a two months’ cruise were excellent. That is the only time I have seen him during this awful six months. He has dropped in several times to see the children, but I have been out.”

“A curious coincidence,” mused Colton idly; then his questions took a new turn. “You had no suspicion that your sister was an opium fiend?”

“No--I wouldn’t have believed--if----” The words choked in her throat.

“Didn’t you drift apart after her marriage?”

“Donald Wreye turned out a cad!” blurted Raelton. “You know that as well as I! He spent every cent of Marjorie’s money. There wasn’t a penny of the hundred thousand her father left when she died. Wreye tried to borrow ten thousand from me five months ago, and I ordered him from the house!”

“Five months ago?” murmured Colton. “He must have got it from someone. I know he was on the ragged edge about that time.” He turned away from them and jabbed two desk-buttons. “You are going back home now. I want you to slip in the way you came. Shrimp will go with you.”

He turned to face The Fee, who had answered one button. “The reporters will probably hold you up, thinking you servants. Let Mr. and Mrs. Raelton slip past, then let the newspaper men get the information that Mrs. Raelton had a serious heart-attack, also that Doctor Henry was asked not to divulge the fact that he had been called. I’ve rung for the machine. It will take you within two or three blocks of your home. Walk the rest of the way, and stay indoors until you hear from me. Now this is important: I want you to give Shrimp two of the headache powders you have been taking, without the knowledge of the maid or any one else. Can you?”

Mrs. Raelton nodded dumbly.

“No one is to know that you have seen me. No one!”

He sat down at the desk and wrote rapidly for a moment.

“Send this telegram on your way back, Shrimp, and tell Michael not to wait for you. Sydney and I want to use the machine.”

He held out his hands to the man and woman. “Good-bye, for a little while,” he said. Silently he watched them out, then he turned toward Sydney.

“Tell John to serve us a cold lunch immediately.”

For the first time in an hour Sydney Thames spoke. “Where are we going?” he asked curiously.

“To see Donald Wreye.”

III.

Society had never called the marriage of Marjorie Calvin and Donald Wreye a brilliant one. Seven years before Marjorie had entered New York society, and society had knelt at her feet. She had many offers of marriage; all were laughed aside. Then came Donald Wreye, big, blond, masterful. He carried the little black-haired girl off her feet, swept the other suitors aside like chaff. He had neither money nor family. By sheer doggedness he had fought his way to a ten-thousand-dollar position in the Street. Society had pleaded with Marjorie Calvin. Thornley Colton had pleaded. But she loved with the love that only women of the Southland feel. They eloped.

For five years the marriage had seemed ideal. Then came the last year. Marjorie’s sunny nature changed completely. Wreye was constantly at his club, drinking, gambling. Thornley Colton was received almost coldly by the girl he loved as a daughter. Then she was found in her room, the pistol she had used beside her.

Wreye cast restraint to the winds then. His position was lost because of dissipation. He had opened an office of his own, and although he was known to do comparatively little business, for the past few months he had seemed to have plenty of money. But to the men and women he had known in the old days he became a pariah.

And it was to his office that Colton and Sydney Thames started in the big machine an hour later. The blind man’s lips were a thin, straight line; the bloodless face sinister in its grimness. What his thoughts were none could tell. Sydney’s were a maze of conflict. The astounding assertion of Colton’s that Dorothy Raelton had never smoked opium had carried him off his feet, mentally, when it was made, but now, with sober afterthought, came the utter absurdity of it. Dorothy had known--_known_--that the blind craving could only be satisfied by the drug, and she had used it. It was not within the range of human possibility that _she_ could be mistaken. And _they_ had seen.

The car came to a stop before a tall office-building near Wall Street. Colton, cane in hand, stepped to the side-walk, and, with only the touch of Sydney’s sleeve against his to guide him, made his way to the elevator. On an upper floor they halted before the door with its plain announcement:

“Donald Wreye, Broker. Odd Lots.”

Following Thornley Colton’s knock came the slam of a hastily-shut drawer, and a gruff invitation to enter. The smile of welcome faded as the heavy-featured man with the tawny hair saw his visitors.

“Well?” he snapped ungraciously, slumping into the swivel chair without even inviting them to be seated.

Thornley Colton’s slim stick located a chair before he answered. “You won’t be well very long unless you keep away from that black bottle in the drawer,” he said grimly.

Wreye jumped to his feet with an oath. “That bottle’s my own affair,” he snarled. “I’ll drink when I damn’ please! I’m not in your bootlicking set any more. I got----” He stopped suddenly. “Get down to cases! This is my busy day.”

The blind man picked up the chair and placed it directly before the big man, not two feet from him. “I want you to answer a few questions.” He said it simply, quietly, but some indefinable timbre of his voice made it a command.

“I’ll answer if I see fit!” blustered Wreye.

“You’ll answer whether you want to or not.” Still that quiet voice; the velvet covering for the will of steel beneath it. Sydney Thames held his breath as he watched the two men. One, a veritable giant, clumsy in his very bigness, face flushed with anger and liquor; the other, half a head shorter, with the chest and shoulders of an athlete, belied by the well-tailored slimness the faultless clothes gave him; face and hair white, accentuated by the big circles of the smoked library-glasses, his cane, held idly between the slim, supersensitive fingers, touching the floor a few inches from Donald Wreye’s foot.

“I’ll see about that!” blustered Wreye, and the words seemed foolishly puerile.

“When did you first discover that your wife was an opium fiend?” It was put so unexpectedly, so baldly, that even Sydney Thames gasped.

The livid fury mounted to the face of Wreye. “By God! You----” His voice trembled with unleashed passion.

Knife-like Thornley Colton’s voice cut in: “Answer me!”

And, like lightning, the answer came--a vicious, smashing right fist straight at the face of the seated blind man!

The exact sequence of ensuing events could never be told by Sydney, for the simple reason that his eyes were incapable of following the moves of the man who was sightless. He remembered leaping to his feet with a cry of horror as the blind man’s chair toppled over. Then he saw a purple-faced, cursing man straining and tugging to release the arms that were being slowly doubled behind him. A crash of a great body hurled downward in the heavy swivel chair, and Thornley Colton, unruffled, breathing accelerated but a trifle, straightened the tortoise-rimmed glasses and smiled down at the man he had so easily mastered.

Mechanically Sydney righted the chair and picked up the blind man’s cane.

“Thanks,” murmured Colton absently, and Sydney Thames gasped in amazement at the smile he saw on the thin lips of the problemist. It was a smile of pure joy; the joy of a man who has learned something more easily than he had expected.

“Don’t you know that a seated man can’t leap to his feet without a warning move of the foot on the floor?” Thornley Colton asked quietly. “My cane told me what you were going to do the instant you knew yourself. Do you want to proceed conversationally or physically?” he finished grimly.

“I could kill you for that!” The big man’s voice was like a sob.

“It was raw,” apologized Colton, but both knew he was referring to the question he had asked, and not the vicious blow, or the struggle. Then the menace came again to his voice. “Where did you get that ten thousand you needed so badly five months ago?”

The effect of this question was fully as startling, in a totally different way, to Sydney Thames as the other had been. The red rage receded from Wreye’s face, the snarl went from the lips; a sneering smile came.

“So you come from my lily-fingered brother-in-law, eh? Hasn’t got the nerve to come himself, I suppose?”

“Where did you get it?” repeated Colton.

“Oh, I’ll tell you quick enough. _I got it from Jimmy Raelton!_”

If this reply was unexpected, it did not cause the slightest change of expression on the face of Thornley Colton.

“Quite strange that he should have given you the money after he had so emphatically refused it once before, wasn’t it?” he observed quietly.

The black scowl came back to Donald Wreye’s face. “The letter that came with the money was devilish plain. The ten thousand was to keep me away from him and his wife. I was told that I’d get something worse than mere loss of position if I even told where it came from. Now I suppose he wants it back.”

“Oh, no,” assured Colton, as he rose. “He doesn’t even know I’m here.”

“What do you want, then?” There was snarling suspicion in the voice now.

“Information--which I got.” The blind man smiled down curiously at the scowling man; then the smile went as quickly as it came. “What became of Marjorie’s hundred thousand dollars?” he jerked out.

“She----” Wreye’s jaws snapped together, the big shoulders hunched aggressively. “If you’re so damn’ clever, find out!” he challenged sullenly.

Sydney Thames could see the man’s huge muscles tighten under the coat, as if he expected force once more, and was prepared to meet it. But Colton only nodded and turned toward the door.

“I will,” he promised grimly. “And I’m going to have you on hand when I make the discovery.”

It was not until they were on the side-walk outside that a word was spoken.

“A man like that makes my blood boil!” ejaculated Sydney Thames.

“Yes?” replied the blind man seriously, but the rising inflection made it enigmatical. His beckoning finger brought a leather-lunged newsboy.

“Latest _Telegram_?”

It was thrust into his hand.

“Did Shrimp see the reporters, Sydney?” he asked, as he handed the paper to Thames and stepped into the car.

“The heart-stroke story is on the first page.”

“Good! Then the advertisement I telephoned must be in. Take us to Doctor Henry’s home, Michael.”

IV.

With plenty of money, a distinguished appearance, and the manners of a courtier, Doctor Charles V. Henry had entered New York society three years before, with letters of introduction from prominent men and women in Paris. He soon opened an office in the fashionable up-town residential district. He had an independent fortune--his bachelor apartments cost him fifteen thousand a year--but it pleased him to follow his profession, and when Doctor Grayton died he fell natural heir to his society practice.

“Do not tell me that you are ill, Mr. Colton!” he laughed, as he ushered the blind man and Sydney into his quietly luxurious office half an hour after they had left Donald Wreye.

“Old Hippocrates and I are sworn enemies,” smiled the problemist. “I came to get a little professional information.”

“Yes?” politely from the physician, as he accepted a proffered cigarette.

“It is this.” Colton spoke seriously; all trace of the smile had gone. “Is there any medicinal cure for opium craving?”

The heavy lashes of the doctor veiled his eyes as he looked down thoughtfully at the floor. “There are several reputed cures,” he said finally. “The most effective, and simple, probably, is rice powder and morphia. The morphia satisfies the violent craving at first, then the drug is diminished gradually, until the patient is satisfied with the harmless rice powder. This is effective, however, only in the first stages.”

“I am speaking of atavistic craving. The opium craving, having skipped one generation, appears doubly strong in the next.”

“You mention a rare case,” said Doctor Henry slowly; “and an incurable one. The effect of opium smoking, primarily, is a sensation of the nerves, or, rather, lack of sensation. The nerves feel the craving first. When that craving finds lodgment in the brain, the case is hopeless. With the inherited craving the process is absolutely reversed. The seat of the trouble is in the brain before the nerves know the drug, and when the nerves once feel the satisfied craving, it becomes a monomania. There is no cure.”

For a full minute there was silence in the office. Thornley Colton blew thoughtful smoke-rings toward the ceiling. Sydney Thames was conscious of a strange, new feeling toward the man he loved; the man who had picked him up as a bundle of baby-clothes on the banks of the English river that had given him the only name he had ever known. The feeling was almost bitter. He could not keep his mind from the man and woman that Colton had sent back to their home but a short time before, full of hope, of joy. Now he realized that the words had been but empty encouragement. And there was no hope!

Thornley Colton spoke again. “I disagree with you, doctor. There is a cure!” He had risen to his feet; his voice trembled with vehemence.

The physician, startled from his usual professional calmness, was on his feet, staring. Colton took a step forward, stumbled blindly against a chair, his hands thrust out gropingly. Before Sydney Thames could reach him, Doctor Henry was again the cool physician. He extended a hand, and led the blind man back to his seat.

“I forgot myself,” apologized the blind man huskily. “This thing has unnerved me.” He swallowed hard, his voice became normal. “The time for equivocation is past, doctor; I’m going to be frank. Dorothy Raelton is an opium fiend!”

The physician half rose again from his chair in amazement. “Why--why--such a thing is incredible!” he gasped.

Briefly, dispassionately, Colton told him of the night before. “Now,” he continued, “for the cure.” Again there was excitement in his voice. “Early to-morrow morning the Raeltons start for a year’s cruise on their yacht. I am making all the arrangements. They will go to the South Pacific, and keep wholly out of touch with the world, Mrs. Raelton will not take her maid, Jimmy will not even have his man. They will be absolutely alone, except for the crew. What do you think of that?”

Doctor Henry’s fingers ceased their nervous drumming on the chair-arm, his lowered eyes raised. “It may be effective,” he admitted, in his deepest professional tones. “At what time--do they start?”

“With the seven-o’clock tide. To-night Mrs. Raelton is going to receive a few intimate friends, and explain last night’s postponement. By the way”--he took the newspaper he had purchased from his pocket--“I used your name in explaining to the reporters the cause of last night’s affair. I knew you wouldn’t object.” The physician took the paper eagerly.

The problemist was almost to the door before he remembered another question. “Did you ever suspect that Mrs. Donald Wreye was an opium fiend?” he asked.

The unexpectedness of the question made Doctor Henry forget his usual suave manner for an instant, and his voice was almost sharp as he replied: “She was not! Her death was----” He stopped suddenly; then, in a different tone, “I am going to meet your frankness with frankness,” he said slowly. “I have always thought Mrs. Wreye’s suicide was a natural result of an utter breaking of her hypersensitive nervous system.”

“Her husband?” put in Colton.

“Yes!” emphatically.

“Marjorie Wreye’s death was not a suicide!” Colton spoke quietly, but in his tone was that ominous menace Sydney Thames had noticed so many times that day. “It was deliberate murder! Good-day, doctor.”

He extended his hand. It was taken by the serious-faced physician. Thornley Colton nodded a jerky farewell, and hurried from the office, his brain automatically counting the steps it had registered when he entered.

In the car, speeding homeward, Sydney Thames drew a long breath.

“Great Scott!” he murmured. “What a villain he is!”

“Doctor Henry?” There was mild surprise in the blind man’s voice.

“Donald Wreye,” corrected Sydney shortly. “Hanging is too good for him!”

“Did you notice the almost curious resemblance between the deep professional tones of Doctor Henry and the ordinary voice of Wreye?” asked the problemist seriously.

Without giving Thames a chance to reply he leaned forward to speak to the driver. “Take us to the nearest drug-store telephone pay-station, Michael,” he ordered. And as the car turned in toward the curb he explained to Sydney: “I must tell the Raeltons of my plans; also get twenty grains of trional and a heavy rubber band. Trional is one of the few harmless narcotics. The rubber band is _highly_ important. It is going to trap the most inhuman criminal I have ever known!”

V.