“Yes,” the Guru was saying to Kennedy, “I can secure you one of the love-pills from India, but it will cost you—­er—­ten dollars.”  I think he hesitated, to see how much the traffic would bear, from one to one hundred, and compromised with only one zero after the unit.  Kennedy appeared satisfied, and the Guru departed with alacrity to secure the specially imported pellet.

In a corner was a sort of dressing-table on which lay a comb and brush.  Kennedy seemed much interested in the table and was examining it when the Guru returned.  Just as the door opened he managed to slip the brush into his pocket and appear interested in the mystic symbols on the wall opposite.

“If that doesn’t work,” remarked the Guru in remarkably good English, “let me know, and you must try one of my charm bottles.  But the love-pills are fine.  Good-day.”

Outside Craig looked at me quizzically.  “You wouldn’t believe it, Walter, would you?” he said.  “Here in this twentieth century in New York, and in fact in every large city of the world—­love-philtres, love-pills, and all the rest of it.  And it is not among the ignorant that these things are found, either.  You remember we saw automobiles waiting before some of the places.”

“I suspect that all who visit the fakirs are not so gullible, after all,” I replied sententiously.

“Perhaps not.  I think I shall have something interesting to say to-night as a result of our visits, at least.”

During the remainder of the day Kennedy was closely confined in his laboratory with his microscopes, slides, chemicals, test-tubes, and other apparatus.  As for myself, I put in the time speculating which of the fakirs had been in some mysterious way connected with the case and in what manner.  Many were the theories which I had formed and the situations I conjured up, and in nearly all I had one central figure, the young man whose escapades had been the talk of even the fast set of a fast society.

That night Kennedy, with the assistance of First Deputy O’Connor, who was not averse to taking any action within the law toward the soothsayers, assembled a curiously cosmopolitan crowd in his laboratory.  Besides the Gilberts were Dudley Lawton and his father, Hata, the Pandit, the Swami, and the Guru—­the latter four persons in high dudgeon at being deprived of the lucrative profits of a Sunday night.

Kennedy began slowly, leading gradually up to his point:  “A new means of bringing criminals to justice has been lately studied by one of the greatest scientific detectives of crime in the world, the man to whom we are indebted for our most complete systems of identification and apprehension.”  Craig paused and fingered the microscope before him thoughtfully.  “Human hair,” he resumed, “has recently been the study of that untiring criminal scientist, M. Bertillon.  He has drawn up a full, classified, and graduated table of all the known colours of the