Ah! See--the scratches I made on the paper
are red."
Then hardly giving us more than a moment to let the fact impress
itself on our minds, he seized the piece of paper and dashed it into
the jar of ammonia. When he withdrew it, it was just a plain sheet
of white paper again. The red marks which the gas in the flask had
brought out of nothingness had been effaced by the ammonia. They had
gone and left no trace.
"In this way I can alternately make the marks appear and disappear by
using the sulpho-cyanide and the ammonia. Whoever wrote this note
with Dr. Dixon's name on it must have had the doctor's reply to
the Thurston letter containing the words, 'This will not cure your
headache.' He carefully traced the words, holding the genuine note up
to the light with a piece of paper over it, leaving out the word 'not'
and using only such words as he needed. This note was then destroyed.
"But he forgot that after he had brought out the red writing by the
use of the sulpho-cyanide, and though he could count on Vera Lytton's
placing the note in the jar of ammonia and hence obliterating the
writing, while at the same time the invisible writing in the mercurous
nitrate involving Dr. Dixon's name would he brought out by the ammonia
indelibly on the other side of the note--he forgot"--Kennedy was now
speaking eagerly and loudly--"that the sulpho-cyanide vapors could
always be made to bring back to accuse him the words that the ammonia
had blotted out."
Before the prosecutor could interfere, Kennedy had picked up the note
found in the ammonia-jar beside the dying girl and had jammed the
state's evidence into the long-necked flask of sulpho-cyanide vapor.
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