Page:Arthur B Reeve - The Dream Doctor.djvu/65

 opposite end of the room, and there, in huge characters, stood forth plainly the writing of the note.

"This letter," he resumed, studying the enlargement carefully, "is likely to prove crucial. It's very queer. Collins says he didn't write it, and if he did he surely is a wonder at disguising his hand. I doubt if any one could disguise what the rayograph shows. Now, for instance, this is very important. Do you see how those strokes of the long letters are—well, wobbly? You'd never see that in the original, but when it is enlarged you see how plainly visible the tremors of the hand become? Try as you may, you can't conceal them. The fact is that the writer of this note suffered from a form of heart disease. Now let us look at the copy that Collins made at the Novella."

He placed the copy on the table of the rayograph. It was quite evident that the two had been written by entirely different persons. "I thought he was telling the truth," commented Craig, "by the surprised look on his face the moment I mentioned the note to Miss Blaisdell. Now I know he was. There is no such evidence of heart trouble in his writing as in the other. Of course that's all aside from what a study of the handwriting itself might disclose. They are not similar at all. But there is an important clue there. Find the writer of that note who has heart trouble, and we either have the murderer or some one close to the murderer."

I remembered the tremulousness of the little beauty-doctor, his third-rate artificial acting of fear for the reputation of the Novella, and I must confess