“This is a rubber age, Walter,” he began, “and the stories of men who have been interested in rubber often sound like fiction.”

He slipped a slide under the microscope, looked at it and then motioned to me to do the same.  “Here is a very peculiar culture which I have found in some of that blood,” he commented.  “The germs are much larger than bacteria and they can be seen with a comparatively low power microscope swiftly darting between the blood cells, brushing them aside, but not penetrating them as some parasites, like that of malaria, do.  Besides, spectroscope tests show the presence of a rather well-known chemical in that blood.”

“A poisoning, then?” I ventured.  “Perhaps he suffered from the disease that many rubber workers get from the bisulphide of carbon.  He must have done a good deal of vulcanising of his own rubber, you know.”

“No,” smiled Craig enigmatically, “it wasn’t that.  It was an arsenic derivative.  Here’s another thing.  You remember the field glass I used?”

He had picked it up from the table and was pointing at a little hole in the side, that had escaped my notice before.  “This is what you might call a right-angled camera.  I point the glass out of the window and while you think I am looking through it I am really focusing it on you and taking your picture standing there beside me and out of my apparent line of vision.  It would deceive the most wary.”

Just then a long-distance call from Winslow told us that Borland had been to call on Miss Ruth and, in as kindly a way as could be, had offered her half a million dollars for her rights in the new patent.  At once it flashed over me that he was trying to get control of and suppress the invention in the interests of his own company, a thing that has been done hundreds of times.  Or could it all have been part of a conspiracy?  And if it was his conspiracy, would he succeed in tempting his friend, Miss Winslow, to fall in with this glittering offer?

Kennedy evidently thought, also, that the time for action had come, for without a word he set to work packing his apparatus and we were again headed for Goodyear.

XVI

THE BLOOD TEST

We arrived late at night, or rather in the morning, but in spite of the late hour Kennedy was up early urging me to help him carry the stuff over to Cushing’s laboratory.  By the middle of the morning he was ready and had me scouring about town collecting his audience, which consisted of the Winslows, Borland and Lathrop, Dr. Howe, Dr. Harris, Strong and myself.  The laboratory was darkened and Kennedy took his place beside an electric moving picture apparatus.

The first picture was different from anything any of us had ever seen on a screen before.  It seemed to be a mass of little dancing globules.  “This,” explained Kennedy, “is what you would call an educational moving picture, I suppose.  It shows normal blood corpuscles as they are in motion in the blood of a healthy man.  Those little round cells are the red corpuscles and the larger irregular cells are the white corpuscles.”