t deal of time, when she was in the city, up at
the apartment Delaney had rented."

Leslie and Kennedy exchanged a significant glance. "Who is she?" asked
Craig. "Do you know?"

"No one seems to know. Yet she is always plentifully supplied with money
and they tell me she talks glibly of those whose 'influence' she can
command in Washington."

"But she has disappeared," mused Kennedy. "Were there any others?"

"Haynes hasn't been proof against their wiles," answered the coroner. "I
have found out that he was introduced by one of the 'war brokers' to a
Madame Daphne Dupres."

"And she?"

Leslie shook his head. "I don't know anything about her, except that she
lives at the Hotel St. Quentin--the same place, by the way, where Haynes
makes his headquarters."

Our car pulled up at the private morgue of the burial company to which
Delaney's body had been taken.

We entered, and Kennedy wasted no time in making a careful examination
of the remains of the unfortunate victim.

"I couldn't make anything out of it, even after an autopsy," confessed
Dr. Leslie. "It seemed as though it were something that had been
conveyed by the blood all over the body, something that blocked the
capillaries and caused innumerable hemorrhages into organs and tissues,
and especially nerve centers."

The body seemed to be discolored and variegated in color, with here and
there little marks of boils or vesicles.

"It looks like something that has depleted the red corpuscles of
oxygen," continued Leslie, noticing that Kennedy had drawn off a little
of the body fluids, evidently for future study. "As nearly as I could
make out there had been a cyanosis in a marked degree. He had all the
appearance of having been asphyxiated."

"Which seems to have been enough to suggest to some imaginative mind the
'purple death,'" remarked Kennedy dryly.

Still, I could not help noticing that it was really no exaggeration to
call it the purple death.

One of the morgue attendants had called Dr. Leslie aside and a moment
later he rejoined us.

"They tell me Haynes has been here," he reported. "I left word that any
visitors were to be carefully watched."

"Strange," muttered Kennedy, absorbing Dr. Leslie's latest information
and then looking back at the body, puzzled. "Very strange. Let us go up
to the apartment right away."

Kennedy stowed the little tube in which he had placed the body fluid
safely in his pocket and led the way out again to our wa