The Social Gangster Part 52

Scarcely had their chair set them down at the inn than Alfonso seemed to appear from nowhere. He had evidently been waiting in the shadow of the porch for them.

We stood aside and watched the little drama. For a few minutes the Senorita talked with him. One did not need to be told that she had a deep regard for the young man. She wanted to see him, yet she did not want to see him. Don Luis, on the contrary, seemed to become quite restive and impatient again and to wish to cut the conversation short.

It was self-evident that Alfonso was deeply in love with Inez. I wondered whether, after all, the trouble was that the proud old Castilian Don Luis would never consent to the marriage of his daughter to one of Indian blood? Was he afraid of a love forbidden by race prejudice?

In any event, one could easily imagine the feelings of Alphonso toward Lockwood, whom he saw carrying off the prize under his very eyes. As for his mother, we had seen that the Peruvians of her caste were a proud old race. Her son was the apple of her eye. Who were these to scorn her race, her family?

It was a little more than an hour after our first meeting when the party, including Lockwood, who had finished his letters, gathered again up in the rooms of the Mendozas.

It was a delightful evening, even in spite of the tension on which we were. We chatted about everything from archeology to Wall Street, until I could well imagine how anyone possessed of an imagination susceptible to the influence of mystery and tradition would succ.u.mb to the glittering charm of the magic words, _peje chica_, and feel all the gold hunter's enthusiasm when brought into the atmosphere of the _peje grande_. Visions of hidden treasure seemed to throw a glamour over everything.

Kennedy and the Senorita had moved over to a window, where they were gazing out on the fairyland of Atlantic Beach spread out before them, while Lockwood and Don Luis were eagerly quizzing me on the possibilities of newspaper publicity.

"Oh, Professor Kennedy," I heard her say under her breath, "sometimes I fear that it is the _mal de ojo_--the evil eye."

I did not catch Craig's answer, but I did catch time and again narrowly observing Don Luis. Our host was smoking furiously now, and his eyes had even more than before that peculiar, staring look. By the way his veins stood out I could see that Mendoza's heart action must be rapid. He was talking more and more wildly as he grew more excited. Even Lockwood noticed it and, I thought, frowned.

Slowly the conviction was forced on me. The man was mad--raving mad!

"Really, I must get back to the city tonight," I overheard Craig say to the Senorita as finally he turned from the window toward us.

Her face clouded, but she said nothing.

"If you could arrange to have us dine with you tomorrow night up here, however," he added quickly in a whisper, "I think I might be prepared to take some action."

"By all means," she replied eagerly, as though catching at anything that promised aid.

On the late train back, I half dozed, wondering what had caused Mendoza's evident madness. Was it a sort of auto-hypnotism? There was, I knew, a form of illusion known as ophthalmophobia--fear of the eye. It ranged from mere aversion at being gazed at, all the way to the subjective development of real physical illness out of otherwise trifling ailments. If not that, what object could there be for anyone to cause such a condition? Might it be for the purpose of robbery? Or might it be for revenge?

Back in the laboratory, Kennedy pulled out from a cabinet a peculiar apparatus. It seemed to consist of a sort of triangular prism set with its edge vertically on a rigid platform attached to a ma.s.sive stand.

Next he lighted one of the cigarette stubs which he had carried away so carefully. The smoke curled up between a powerful light and the peculiar instrument, while Craig peered through a lens, manipulating the thing with exhaustless patience and skill.

Finally he beckoned me over and I looked through, too. On a sort of fine grating all I could see was a number of strange lines.

"That," he explained in answer to my unspoken question as I continued to gaze, "is one of the latest forms of the spectroscope, known as the interferometer, with delicately ruled gratings in which power to resolve the straight close lines in the spectrum is carried to the limit of possibility. A small watch is delicate, but it bears no comparison to the delicacy of these detraction spectroscopes.

"Every substance, you know, is, when radiating light, characterized by what at first appears to be almost a haphazard set of spectral lines without relation to one another. But they are related by mathematical laws and the apparent haphazard character is only the result of our lack of knowledge of how to interpret the results."

He resumed his place at the eye-piece to check over his results.

"Walter," he said finally with a twinkle of the eye, "I wish you'd go out and find me a cat."

"A cat?" I repeated.

"Yes--a cat--felis domesticus, if it sounds better that way, a plain ordinary cat."

I jammed on my hat and, late as it was, sallied forth on this apparently ridiculous mission.

Several belated pa.s.sers-by and a policeman watched me as though I were a house-breaker and I felt like a fool, but at last by perseverance and tact I managed to capture a fairly good specimen of the species and transported it in my arms to the laboratory without an undue number of scratches.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

THE WEED OF MADNESS

In my absence Craig had set to work on a peculiar apparatus, as though he were distilling something from several of the other cigarette stubs.

I placed the cat in a basket and watched Craig until finally he seemed to be rewarded for his patient labors. It was well along toward morning when he obtained in a test-tube a few drops of a colorless, almost odorless liquid.

I watched him curiously as he picked the cat out of the basket and held it gently in his arms. With a dropper he sucked up a bit of the liquid from the test-tube. Then he let a small drop fall into the eye of the cat.

The cat blinked a moment and I bent over to observe it more closely. The cat's eye seemed to enlarge, even under the light, as if it were the proverbial cat's eye under a bed.

What did it mean? Was there such a thing as the drug of the evil eye?

"What have you found?" I queried.

"Something very much like the so-called 'weed of madness,' I think," he replied slowly.

"The weed of madness?" I repeated.

"Yes, something like that Mexican toloache and the Hindu datura which you must have heard about," he continued. "You know the jimson weed--the Jamestown weed? It grows almost everywhere in the world, but most thrivingly in the tropics. They are all related in some way, I believe. The jimson weed on the Pacific coast of the Andes has large white flowers which exhale a faint, repulsive odor. It is a harmless looking plant with its thick tangle of leaves, a coa.r.s.e green growth, with trumpet-shaped flowers. But, to one who knows its properties, it is quite too dangerously convenient.

"I think those cigarettes have been doped," he went on positively. "It isn't toloache that was used. I think it must be some particularly virulent variety of the jimson weed. Perhaps it is in the preparation of the thing. The seeds of the stramonium, which is the same thing, contain a higher percentage of poison than the leaves and flowers. Perhaps they were used. I can't say."

He took a drop of the liquid he had isolated and added a drop of nitric acid. Then he evaporated it by gentle heat and it left a residue which was slightly yellow.

Next he took from the shelf over his table a bottle marked alcoholic solution, pota.s.sium hydrate, and let a drop fall on it. Instantly the residue became a beautiful purple, turning rapidly to violet, then to dark red and finally disappeared.

"Stramonium all right," he nodded with satisfaction. "That was known as Vitali's test. Yes, there was stramonium in those cigarettes--datura stramonium--perhaps a trace of hyocyamino. They are all, like atropine, mydriatic alkaloids, so-called from the effect on the eye. One one-hundred-thousandth of a grain will affect the cat's eye. You saw how it acted. It is more active than even atropine. Better yet, you remember how Don Luis's eyes looked."

"How about the Senora?" I put in.

"Oh," he answered quickly, "her pupils were normal enough. Didn't you notice that? This concentrated poison which has been used in Mendoza's cigarettes does not kill, at least not outright. It is worse. Slowly it acc.u.mulates in the system. It acts on the brain. Of all the dangers to be met with in superst.i.tious countries, these mydriatic alkaloids are among the worst. They offer a chance for crimes of the most fiendish nature--worse than the gun or the stiletto, and with little fear of detection. It is the production of insanity!"

Horrible though the idea was I could not doubt it in the face of Craig's investigations and what I had already seen. In fact, it was necessary for me only to recall the peculiar sensations I myself had experienced after smoking merely a few puffs of one of Mendoza's cigarettes in order to be convinced of the possible effect of the insidious poison contained in the many that he smoked.

It was almost dawn before Craig and I left the laboratory after his discovery of the manner of the stramonium poisoning. I was thoroughly tired, though not so much so that my dreams were not haunted by a succession of baleful eyes peering at me from the darkness.

I slept late, but Kennedy was about early at the laboratory, verifying his experiments and checking over his results, carefully endeavoring to isolate any other of the closely related mydriatic alkaloids that might be contained in the noxious fumes of the poisoned tobacco. Though he was already convinced of what was going on, I knew that he considered it a matter of considerable medico-legal importance to be exact, for if the affair ever came to the stage of securing an indictment, the charge could be sustained only by specific proof.

Early in the forenoon Kennedy left me alone in the laboratory and made a trip downtown, where he visited a South American tobacco dealer and placed a rush order for a couple of hundred cigarettes, duplicating in shape and quality those which Senor Mendoza doza preferred, except, however, the deadly drug which was in those he was smoking.

I had some writing to do and was busily engaged at my typewriter when I suddenly became conscious of that feeling of being watched. Perhaps I had heard a footstep outside and did not remember it, but at any rate I had the feeling. I stopped tapping the keys suddenly and wheeled about in my chair just in time to catch a glimpse of a face dodging back from the window. I don't think that I would be prepared to swear just who it was, but there was just enough that was familiar about the fleeting glimpse of the eyes to make me feel uncomfortable.

I ran to the door, but it was too late. The intruder had disappeared.