It hurled Farragut back down the stairs. He went bouncing, sprawling to the very bottom, landing with his glasses broken and his body bruised. He lay for seconds too dazed to move. Then he picked himself up, grabbed his automatic. Face white, set, and bleeding from a cut made by his broken glasses, he started up the stairs again.
But the hall above was filled with choking vapor. Behind this foglike wall a shot suddenly sounded. Then Farragut heard a clatter of running feet at the other end of the upper hallway, and cursed fiercely, knowing there was a rear set of stairs.
The sound of the footsteps died away. Farragut, gripping his gun, thrust resolutely into that pall of smoke. But it confused him, blinded him, and he spent nearly three minutes opening the doors of empty rooms and batting against walls.
When the vapor began to clear a little he saw a reeling figure coming toward him. A man with a bloody face, staring eyes, and arms that waved frantically lurched down the hall. It was Caulder’s male nurse, his coat torn, a bruise on his cheek, a two-inch cut on his forehead pouring blood. His white lips opened and a creaking sound came from them. “Fire!”
Farragut smelled more smoke then, and saw suddenly that there was a wavering, lurid glow coming from the sick room door.
“There’s an extinguisher in the bathroom,” gasped the nurse. If I can get it -”
The man lurched on. Farragut ran toward that lighted doorway. It had been shattered by the second grenade. The panels were cracked and the door sagged on its hinges. Worse still, the bomb had set fire to Caulder’s bedclothes and to draperies in the room.
Flames were shooting up in a dozen places. Farragut lurched toward the bed where a figure lay, stepped back gasping as flames singed his eyebrows, then gathered up a blanket and began beating at them. One patch of flame had crept close to Caulder’s face. The inspector concentrated on this.
He was helped in a moment by the nurse who came back clutching a red fire extinguisher. The squirting chemical did the work better than Farragut’s blanket, which put the flames out in some places, but fanned them in others. In a moment the blaze in the bedclothes was out. They turned their attention to the draperies. Farragut snatched the extinguisher from the nurse’s hands.
“Look out for him,” he snapped, jerking his thumb toward Caulder. “See if he’s alive.”
The nurse, weakened from loss of blood, stumbled faithfully toward the bed. While Farragut put out the last of the flames, the nurse tipped back Caulder’s head and gave him a stimulant. Caulder’s grey hair was singed, his face blackened with smoke, but his heart was still beating. The nurse gave a cry of thankfulness, then collapsed on the floor with his bloody face lolling inertly beside his patient’s bed.
It was five minutes later, after Dick Van Loan had picked himself up painfully and entered the house, that the nurse recovered enough to talk.
His words came tremblingly.
“After the explosion outside,” he said, “I heard someone coming along the hall. I went to the door. It was a man, a stranger. He lifted his arm and threw something when he saw me. I ducked back and dropped flat in time to escape being blown to pieces by the second grenade.”
“Did you get a good look at him?” Van asked tensely.
“Yes,” said Farragut. “He was running.” The inspector turned and gave an order to Sergeant Nelson. “Watch every door and window. Caulder’s still alive and that devil may have nerve enough to try coming back.”
The nurse shook his head. “If Mr. Caulder’s death was what he wanted, he won’t need to come back. This shock will finish Mr. Caulder.”
Dick Van Loan agreed. “To a man in his condition those two explosions and that fire should be as fatal as bullets.”
The family doctor came and confirmed the Phantom’s words. Caulder was very low, his heart feeble and irregular, the spark of life already flickering.
“He may go any time now,” said the doctor. “At most I would say he can’t last a week.”
Farragut spoke fiercely. “You hear that, Phantom! The murderer has succeeded, after all.”
“Yes,” said Van bitterly, “it looks so.”
He didn’t reproach Farragut for not seeing to it that his men were more wary. There was no use in reproaches now. But the inspector’s detectives had fallen for that trick of the exploding bomb out on the lawn which had killed two of their number. The others had left their posts, and during that time there had been plenty of opportunity for a killer to make his entry.
THE door at the bottom of the back stairway led to a side porch. It was now unlocked, swinging open, and there was no chance of finding footprints out on the tight, frozen sod of the lawn.
“I agree that the Chief probably won’t come back here,” Van went on. “But we can expect him in other places. Double the guard around Winstead’s room in the hospital, Inspector. And I advise you to place armed men in the cells next to Moxley’s up in the pen, too. The Chief might bribe some fellow prisoner to kill him.”
Van turned then and picked up the dancing doll which had come to Caulder’s house in the late mail like the others. He examined it. Again the Chief had given notice of the murder method he planned to use. For the doll’s wig and clothing had been singed in a dozen spots. Van shuddered. The faint smell of that burned hair was almost like roasting flesh. Except for the courage and quick thinking of Caulder’s nurse that odor would now be permeating the whole house.
The Phantom spoke suddenly.
“With your permission, Inspector, I’m going to make a thorough dust examination of the house. That explosion stirred up enough of it, and this crime differs in one respect from all the others. The Chief, according to the story we’ve just heard, worked alone. He came alone, flung his grenades, and set his fires. We have reason to believe we know just which way he took into the house and out. That’s why a dust collection and analysis is indicated. I’ve got the necessary equipment. I’ll go get it, come back here, and go over every inch of floor space the Chief must have traveled.”
Farragut nodded. “It’s okay by me, Phantom.”
Van borrowed a police coupe, drove it himself back to Dr. Paul Bendix’s laboratory. He had already turned Blackie Guido over to the inspector. The man was now warming a cell in the Tombs.
Van took a bulky apparatus down from a shelf. It was a vacuum cleaner, but of no ordinary kind. Its mechanism was almost silent, in spite of its super-powerful motor. There were over a dozen different shaped nozzles which could be used to collect dust from every conceivable location in a room.
And, instead of one dust bag, there were a dozen small ones, with blank tags on them. More and more the scientific examination of dust was becoming an aid to criminology. And the Phantom, as usual, had the very latest gadgets.
He hurried back to Caulder’s home with his equipment and went over every inch of the route they had reason to think the killer had taken. The sick man had been removed to another room; because the broken windows on the north side made his former bedroom uninhabitable. Van went in that, too.
It was filled with detectives, but they moved aside respectfully to let the Phantom work. The thin hum of his strange vacuum cleaner sounded minute after minute. He went at it systematically, even opening the doors of several closets and thrusting one of his nozzles inside. No telling where dust might have been blown to in that violent explosion. Each time he got a sample from a different room or closet he took the dust bag off, tagged it, and fastened a new one on.
He left the Caulder home with enough dust to occupy him for several days. It might even take him a week to look through the millions of particles with the aid of microscopes and chemicals.
But it was the sort of work the Phantom loved when he wasn’t engaged in violent action. He would turn the white light of science on the macabre trail of the Chief. He left word with Frank Havens to call him at the Bendix
