The War Terror | Page 6

a side street several
blocks from the main thoroughfares of Manhattan. He had evidently
chosen it, partly because of its very inaccessibility in order to secure the
quiet necessary for his work.
"If he had any visitors last night," commented Kennedy when our cab
at last pulled up before the place, "they might have come and gone
unnoticed."

We entered. Nothing had been disturbed in the laboratory by the
coroner and Kennedy was able to gain a complete idea of the case
rapidly, almost as well as if we had been called in immediately.
Fortescue's body, it seemed, had been discovered sprawled out in a big
armchair, as Burke had said, by one of his assistants only a few hours
before when he had come to the laboratory in the morning to open it.
Evidently he had been there undisturbed all night, keeping a gruesome
vigil over his looted treasure house.
As we gleaned the meager facts, it became more evident that whoever
had perpetrated the crime must have had the diabolical cunning to do it
in some ordinary way that aroused no suspicion on the part of the
victim, for there was no sign of any violence anywhere.
As we entered the laboratory, I noted an involuntary shudder on the
part of Paula Lowe, but, as far as I knew, it was no more than might
have been felt by anyone under the circumstances.
Fortescue's body had been removed from the chair in which it had been
found and lay on a couch at the other end of the room, covered merely
by a sheet. Otherwise, everything, even the armchair, was undisturbed.
Kennedy pulled back a corner of the sheet, disclosing the face,
contorted and of a peculiar, purplish hue from the congested blood
vessels. He bent over and I did so, too. There was an unmistakable odor
of tobacco on him. A moment Kennedy studied the face before us, then
slowly replaced the sheet.
Miss Lowe had paused just inside the door and seemed resolutely
bound not to look at anything. Kennedy meanwhile had begun a most
minute search of the table and floor of the laboratory near the spot
where the armchair had been sitting.
In my effort to glean what I could from her actions and expressions I
did not notice that Craig had dropped to his knees and was peering into
the shadow under the laboratory table. When at last he rose and
straightened himself up, however, I saw that he was holding in the palm

of his hand a half-smoked, gold-tipped cigarette, which had evidently
fallen on the floor beneath the table where it had burned itself out,
leaving a blackened mark on the wood.
An instant afterward he picked out from the pile of articles found in
Fortescue's pockets and lying on another table a silver cigarette case.
He snapped it open. Fortescue's cigarettes, of which there were perhaps
a half dozen in the case, were cork- tipped.
Some one had evidently visited the inventor the night before, had
apparently offered him a cigarette, for there were any number of the
cork-tipped stubs lying about. Who was it? I caught Paula looking with
fascinated gaze at the gold-tipped stub, as Kennedy carefully folded it
up in a piece of paper and deposited it in his pocket. Did she know
something about the case, I wondered?
Without a word, Kennedy seemed to take in the scant furniture of the
laboratory at a glance and a quick step or two brought him before a
steel filing cabinet. One drawer, which had not been closed as tightly as
the rest, projected a bit. On its face was a little typewritten card bearing
the inscription: "E-M GUN."
He pulled the drawer open and glanced over the data in it.
"Just what is an electro-magnetic gun?" I asked, interpreting the initials
on the drawer.
"Well," he explained as he turned over the notes and sketches, "the
primary principle involved in the construction of such a gun consists in
impelling the projectile by the magnetic action of a solenoid, the
sectional coils or helices of which are supplied with current through
devices actuated by the projectile itself. In other words, the sections of
helices of the solenoid produce an accelerated motion of the projectile
by acting successively on it, after a principle involved in the
construction of electro-magnetic rock drills and dispatch tubes.
"All projectiles used in this gun of Fortescue's evidently must have
magnetic properties and projectiles of iron or containing large portions

of iron are necessary. You see, many coils are wound around the barrel
of the gun. As the projectile starts it does so under the attraction of
those coils ahead which the current makes temporary magnets. It
automatically cuts off the current from those coils that it passes,