I thought I could read what was passing in his
mind. With all his faults Lewis Langley had been a good
foster-parent to his adopted children. But it was all over now if
the will was lost.
"What can I do?" asked Tom hopelessly. "I have nothing to reply
to him."
"But I have," quietly returned Kennedy, deliberately folding up
the message and handing it back. "Tell them all to be in the
library in fifteen minutes. This message hurries me a bit, but I
am prepared. You will have something to wire Mr. Clark after
that." Then he strode off toward the house, leaving us to gather
the group together in considerable bewilderment.
A quarter of an hour later we had all assembled in the library,
across the hall from the room in which Lewis Langley had been
found. As usual Kennedy began by leaping straight into the middle
of his subject.
"Early in the eighteenth century;" he commenced slowly, "a woman
was found burned to death. There were no clues, and the
scientists of that time suggested spontaneous combustion. This
explanation was accepted. The theory always has been that the
process of respiration by which the tissues of the body are used
up and got rid of gives the body a temperature, and it has seemed
that it may be possible, by preventing the escape of this heat,
to set fire to the body.
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