“An instrument that was invented many years ago, but has only recently been perfected for practical, every-day use, the telautograph, the long-distance writer,” replied Kennedy, as we waited.  “You see, with what amounts to an ordinary pencil I have written on the paper of the transmitter.  The silk cord attached to the pencil regulates the current which controls another capillary glass tube-pen at the other end of the line.  The receiving pen moves simultaneously with my stylus.  It is the same principle as the pantagraph, cut in half as it were, one half here, the other half at the other end of the line, two telephone wires in this case connecting the halves.  Ah,—­that’s it.  The pencil of the receiving instrument is writing again.  Just a moment.  Let us see what it is.”

I almost gasped in astonishment at the words that I saw.  I looked again, for I could not believe my eyes.  Still, there it was.  My first glance had been correct, impossible as it was.

“I, Patrick Murtha,” wrote the pen.

“What is it?” asked Carton, awestruck.  “A dead hand?”

“Stop a minute,” wrote Kennedy hastily.

We bent over him closely.  Craig had drawn from a packet several letters, which he had evidently secured in some way from the effects of Murtha.  Carefully, minutely, he compared the words before us with the signatures at the bottom of the letters.

“It is genuine!” he cried excitedly.

“Genuine!” Carton and I echoed.

What did he mean?  Was this some kind of spiritism?  Had Kennedy turned medium and sought a message from the other world to solve the inexplicable problems of this?  It was weird, uncanny, unthinkable.  We turned to him blankly for an explanation of the mystery.

“That wasn’t Murtha at all whose body we saw at the Morgue,” he hurried to explain.  “That was all a frame-up.  I thought as soon as I saw it that there was something queer.”

I recalled now the peculiar look on his face which I had interpreted as indicating that he thought Murtha had been the victim of foul play.

“And the other night, when we were in Carton’s office and someone called up threatening you, Carton, and Dopey Jack, I saw at once that the voice was concealed.  Yet there was something about it that was familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it.  I had heard that voice before, perhaps while we were getting the records to discover the ‘wolf.’  It occurred to me that if I had a record of it I might identify it by comparing it with those we had already taken.  I got the record.  I studied it.  I compared it with what I already had, line, and wave, and overtone.  You can imagine how I felt when I found there was only one voice with which it corresponded, and that man was supposed to be dead.  Something more than intuition as I looked at the body that night had roused my suspicions.  Now they were confirmed.  Fancy how that information must have burned in my mind, during these days while I knew that Murtha was alive, but could say nothing!”