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“He had scarcely been removed to a hospital where, after fighting a brave fight, he succumbed to the unknown peril, when the butler was stricken. Delaney himself packed up, to leave, in panic, when suddenly, apparently without warning, the purple death carried him off. In three days three of them have died suddenly. Then came this letter from the Baroness. It set me thinking. Perhaps it was poison–I don’t know.”

Craig read the letter of the Baroness again. “Most interesting,” he exclaimed energetically as Dr. Leslie finished. “I shall be only too glad to help you if I can. Could you take us up to Delaney’s rooms? Is the body still there?”

“No, it has been removed to a private undertaking establishment and the apartment is guarded by police. We can stop at the undertaker’s on the way over to the apartment.”

There could be no doubt that Leslie was considerably relieved to think that Craig would consent to take the case. As for Kennedy, I could see that the affair aroused his interest to the keenest point.

“Was anyone associated with Delaney in the syndicate here?” inquired Craig as we settled ourselves in Dr. Leslie’s car.

“Yes,” answered the coroner, hurrying us along, “another member of the syndicate was his friend, Dr. Harris Haynes.”

“Who is he?” asked Kennedy.

“Haynes has been a veterinary, but found that there was more money in the cattle business than in practicing his profession. The needs of European war seemed to offer just the opportunity they needed to reap a quick fortune.”

“I’ve heard,” nodded Craig, “that conditions abroad have led to a great influx of adventurers with other people’s money.”

“Yes. According to all accounts, Delaney and Haynes have been leading a rather rapid existence since they came to New York. It’s quite right. The city is full of queer and mysterious characters, both men and women, who profess to be agents for various foreign governments, often unnamed. Delaney and Haynes have met about all of this curious army, I suppose.”

“I see,” prompted Craig. “Among them, I take it, was this stunning woman who calls herself the Baroness Louise Von Dorf. How friendly were they?”

“Well, she spent a great deal of time, when she was in the city, up at the apartment Delaney had rented.”

Leslie and Kennedy exchanged a significant glance. “Who is she?” asked Craig. “Do you know?”

“No one seems to know. Yet she is always plentifully supplied with money and they tell me she talks glibly of those whose ‘influence’ she can command in Washington.”

“But she has disappeared,” mused Kennedy. “Were there any others?”

“Haynes hasn’t been proof against their wiles,” answered the coroner. “I have found out that he was introduced by one of the ‘war brokers’ to a Madame Daphne Dupres.”

“And she?”

Leslie shook his head. “I don’t know anything about her, except that she lives at the Hotel St. Quentin–the same place, by the way, where Haynes makes his headquarters.”

Our car pulled up at the private morgue of the burial company to which Delaney’s body had been taken.

We entered, and Kennedy wasted no time in making a careful examination of the remains of the unfortunate victim.

“I couldn’t make anything out of it, even after an autopsy,” confessed Dr. Leslie. “It seemed as though it were something that had been conveyed by the blood all over the body, something that blocked the capillaries and caused innumerable hemorrhages into organs and tissues, and especially nerve centers.”

The body seemed to be discolored and variegated in color, with here and there little marks of boils or vesicles.

“It looks like something that has depleted the red corpuscles of oxygen,” continued Leslie, noticing that Kennedy had drawn off a little of the body fluids, evidently for future study. “As nearly as I could make out there had been a cyanosis in a marked degree. He had all the appearance of having been asphyxiated.”

“Which seems to have been enough to suggest to some imaginative mind the ‘purple death,'” remarked Kennedy dryly.