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Kennedy paused. As usual he had his little audience following him breathlessly. Even Dr. Loeb forgot to glower.

“In recent experiments with cancer in chickens,” continued Craig, “tumor material ground fine and treated in various ways has been filtered through these filters. Cancers have been caused by this agent which has passed through the filter.

“On the inside of the filter which I picked up back of this very house, near the boundary of Dr. Goode’s, I have found the giant cells of cancer. On the outside was something which I have been able to develop into a virus, these micro-organisms that belong to the ultra-invisible. I do not pretend to know just how this bacteriological dwarf has been used. But I know enough to say that someone has, without doubt, been using some sort of filterable virus to induce cancers, just as the experimenters at the Rockefeller Institute have done with animals.

“Naturally, in the Moreton family, this person found a fertile soil. Perhaps he waited until he saw what looked like a favorable wound, or traumatism. It is well-known that cancer often can be traced to a wound. Perhaps he introduced this virus surreptitiously into a cut, now and then. For, experiments show that the virus is strikingly dependent for its action on the derangement of the tissues with which it is brought in contact.

“This person must have had a high percentage of failures in his attempts to inoculate the virus successfully. But by persistence and taking advantage of every predisposition afforded by nature, he succeeded. At any rate, this person must have been intimately acquainted with the family, must have had some motive for seeking their deaths,–for instance the family fortune.

“It makes no difference whether the victims might have had cancer sooner or later, anyway. Even if that were so, this cold-blooded villain was at least hastening the development, if not actually causing the frightful and fatal disease.”

Myra Moreton shuddered, and looked at Dr. Goode anxiously as Kennedy proceeded. He seemed about to interrupt, but managed to check himself. Craig reached over and picked out from the satchel the hat which we had found on a desk at the office of the cancer quack.

“In the raid of Dr. Loeb’s,” he explained, changing tone, “a man disappeared. I have here a soft hat which he left behind in his hurry to escape, as well as some of the filters he was carrying.”

He turned the hat inside out. “You will see,” Craig pointed out, “that on the felt of the inside there are numerous hairs, from the head of the wearer.”

I leaned forward, breathlessly. I began to see the part I had played in building up his case.

“Human hair,” he remarked, “differs greatly. Under the microscope one may study the oval-shaped medulla, the long pointed cortex, and the flat cuticle cells of an individual hair. The pigment in the cortex can be studied also.

“I have taken some of the hairs from the inside of this hat, examined, photographed, and measured them. I have compared them with a color scale perfected by the late Alphonse Bertillon. In fact, in France quite a science has been built up about hair by the so-called ‘pilologists.’ The German scientific criminalists have written minute treaties on the hair and astounding results have been obtained by them in detection.

“I have been able to secure samples of the hair of everyone in this case and I have studied them also. These hairs in the hat which was left over the package of filters have furnished me with a slender but no less damning clew to a veritable monster.”

One could have heard a pin drop, as if Kennedy were a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

“Dr. Loeb is guilty of being one of the most heartless of quacks, it is true,” Kennedy’s voice rang out tensely, as he faced us. “But the slow murders, one by one, bringing the family estate nearer and nearer–they were done by one who hoped to throw the blame on Dr. Loeb, by the man whose hair I have here–Lionel Moreton.”