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.