The Dream Doctor

꘬The Dream Doctor

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dream Doctor, by Arthur B. Reeve (#3 in our series by Arthur B. Reeve)
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Title: The Dream Doctor
Author: Arthur B. Reeve
Release Date: February, 2004 [EBook #5054] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on April 11, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE DREAM DOCTOR ***

Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE CRAIG KENNEDY SERIES
THE DREAM DOCTOR
BY ARTHUR B. REEVE

FRONTISPIECE BY WILL FOSTER

Contents

CHAPTER
I The Dream Doctor
II The Soul Analysis
III The Sybarite
IV The Beauty Shop
V The Phantom Circuit
VI The Detectaphone
VII The Green Curse
VIII The Mummy Case
IX The Elixir of Life
X The Toxin of Death
XI The Opium Joint
XII The "Dope Trust"
XIII The Kleptomaniac
XIV The Crimeometer
XV The Vampire
XVI The Blood Test
XVII The Bomb Maker
XVIII The "Coke" Fiend
XIX The Submarine Mystery
XX The Wireless Detector
XXI The Ghouls
XXII The X-Ray "Movies"
XXIII The Death House
XXIV The Final Day

THE DREAM DOCTOR
I
THE DREAM DOCTOR
"Jameson, I want you to get the real story about that friend of yours, Professor Kennedy," announced the managing editor of the Star, early one afternoon when I had been summoned into the sanctum.
From a batch of letters that had accumulated in the litter on the top of his desk, he selected one and glanced over it hurriedly.
"For instance," he went on reflectively, "here's a letter from a Constant Reader who asks, 'Is this Professor Craig Kennedy really all that you say he is, and, if so, how can I find out about his new scientific detective method?'"
He paused and tipped back his chair.
"Now, I don't want to file these letters in the waste basket. When people write letters to a newspaper, it means something. I might reply, in this case, that he is as real as science, as real as the fight of society against the criminal. But I want to do more than that."
The editor had risen, as if shaking himself momentarily loose from the ordinary routine of the office.
"You get me?" he went on, enthusiastically, "In other words, your assignment, Jameson, for the next month is to do nothing except follow your friend Kennedy. Start in right now, on the first, and cross-section out of his life just one month, an average month. Take things just as they come, set them down just as they happen, and when you get through give me an intimate picture of the man and his work."
He picked up the schedule for the day and I knew that the interview was at an end. I was to "get" Kennedy.
Often I had written snatches of Craig's adventures, but never before anything as ambitious as this assignment, for a whole month. At first it staggered me. But the more I thought about it, the better I liked it.
I hastened uptown to the apartment on the Heights which Kennedy and I had occupied for some time. I say we occupied it. We did so during those hours when he was not at his laboratory at the Chemistry Building on the University campus, or working on one of those cases which fascinated him. Fortunately, he happened to be there as I burst in upon him.
"Well?" he queried absently, looking up from a book, one of the latest untranslated treatises on the new psychology from the pen of the eminent scientist, Dr. Freud of Vienna, "what brings you uptown so early?"
Briefly as I could, I explained to him what it was that I proposed to do. He listened without comment and I rattled on, determined not to allow him to negative it.
"And," I added, warming up to the subject, "I think I owe a debt of gratitude to the managing editor. He has crystallised in my mind an idea that has long been latent. Why, Craig," I went on, "that is exactly what you want--to show people how they can never hope to beat the modern scientific detective, to show that the crime-hunters have gone ahead faster even than--"
The telephone tinkled insistently.
Without a word,