The Stolen War Secret/Chapter 15

AVE you any idea what the poison is?” asked Dr. Leslie at length, voicing the thought which had been in my own mind.

Kennedy nodded.

“A very clear idea,” he said briefly.

“What is it?” asked Sinclair. “Some strange South American poison like curare, or is it one of those Mexican poisons that I have heard of, the mariguana [sic] weed or the toluache?”

Craig shook his head.

“Neither,” he answered slowly.

Then as he saw the look of curiosity on all our faces, he went on deliberately—

“I suppose this is as good a time as any in which to tell of what I have discovered and what I expect to discover.”

We pressed forward as he began to speak, hanging on his words and for the moment forgetful of the wretched woman on the couch, for whom science was fighting valiantly to clear up the mystery.

Kennedy reached into the pocket of his coat on a chair and drew forth the little reed-stick, with the buff-brown cylinder on the end. Simple though it was, it seemed now endowed with an awful power. He laid it on the table before us, our eyes riveted on it.

“That,” he began solemnly, “is a little article which I picked up under the window of the extension in which Professor Neumeyer had his study and private museum. Mr. Sinclair will remember the occasion. It was while he was searching through the collection to discover whether anything was missing.”

Kennedy was evidently calculating his psychology well. It was a weird hour, fast approaching the gray of dawn; the surroundings were such as to inspire fear. In my mind’s eye I could see distinctly the picture that he conjured up—the terribly contorted face of the old archeologist, the uncanny idol squatting on the desk before him, the curious collection of the lore of ancient and almost forgotten races about him.

“What was missing, Sinclair?” shot out Kennedy, then, before Sinclair could answer he added quickly—“It was the so-called Pillar of Death—the porphyry block that told the secret of the buried Mixtec treasure, the block about which there had clustered innumerable superstitions.”

Sinclair fairly gasped—

“How did you know that?”

“Never mind,” pursued Kennedy evenly, “but I did know it, and others, many others, knew it. On the back of his neck I found a round red mark. It was the same as the mark I found on the arm of Valcour when first I saw her dead, alone, in her room at the Vanderveer.”

The other picture flashed over me, of the proud adventuress, perhaps feeling the poi son circulating through her veins, seeking to gain her room, only there to die. Where had she been? How had the poison been given her? And why?

“Some one,” continued Craig, “has used the same poison twice—once to secure a secret which would make him, would make his government invincible, invulnerable, and again to secure for himself a fortune which would make of him a modern Crœsus. It was a high stake, worth playing for in his estimation, by every means, fair and foul—even the foulest and most barbaric.”

Dr. Leslie had so far succeeded in shaking loose his attention from Kennedy as to lean over and touch the buff-brown cylinder with his finger.

“And this?” he asked. “What is this?”

“The barbaric means to his end which he chose,” replied Kennedy impressively. “That little cylinder is a piece of annonoki, or bushi."

We stared at him blankly, having only a faint inkling of what it was. The mere words had in them something that showed us that this was no usual case. Who had used it, how he had obtained it, none of us asked, but allowed Craig to proceed now in his own way in explaining the mystery as far as he was able.

“Now,” he resumed, looking at Dr. Leslie more than at the rest of us, “in the case of aconite poisoning, not only is the lethal dose very small but, as you know, our chemical methods of detection are almost valueless, if not quite so.

“The dose of the active principle, aconitin nitrate, is about one six-hundredth of a grain. There are no color tests, no reaction as in the case of many other organic poisons. It is no wonder that Dr. Leslie’s men were unable to determine what the nature of the poison was in either the case of Valcour or later in the case of Neumeyer.”

I WONDERED what he was driving at. Was there indeed no way, short of the actual fact of sudden death, to prove that they had died of poisoning, no test, no manner in which the poisonings could be fixed on some one? Had the murderer used the safest of poisons?

“Then it will be impossible to connect any one with these murders, I’m afraid,” broke in Dr. Leslie, repeating what he had already said before in the laboratory. “You have admitted yourself that there is no test for aconitin, once it gets into the system. You couldn’t even prove that it was some form of aconite that killed them.”

We were all looking at Kennedy whose self-possession was unruffled. The bare possibility that the murderer might escape by some technicality was appalling.

“I have not said there was no test—absolutely none,” he remarked quietly.

Kennedy paused as he raised this faint spark of hope, then went on:

“I suppose you never dreamed that starch granules might afford a method of tracing out the nature of a poison quite the equal of the blood-crystal tests by which we can now tell both the species of the animal from which blood comes and even the various races among men, perhaps soon the very individual from which certain drops of blood came.”

“No,” replied Dr. Leslie, “I have always considered that all starch was alike, in fact.”

Kennedy smiled.

“Far from it,” he went on. “Recently Dr. Edward Reichert of the University of Pennsylvania has discovered a new starch test, a means of detecting the nature of a poison in obscure cases in criminology, and especially in cases where the quantity of poison necessary to cause death is so minute that no trace of it can be found in the blood after a very short interval.”

Kennedy was reveling now in what I call his minutiæ of crime, one of those almost ultra-microscopic methods of getting at the facts of a case and securing evidence where it seemed impossible.

“To me at least,” he pursued, “the so-called ‘starch method’ is a novel and extremely inviting subject. Thus, according to modern research, the peculiarities of the starch granules of any plant are quite as distinctive of the plant as are the peculiarities of the hemoglobin crystals of the blood of an animal.”

Dr. Leslie was following him intently now, scepticism overcome.

“When such a poison as aconite,” pursued Craig, “is introduced subcutaneously, either by a needle-thrust delivered when a victim is partly under the influence of some other drug or drink, or when the victim is taken by surprise and off guard, the lethal constituents are rapidly absorbed. Formerly a murderer might have depended on that to defy detection. But not now. The starch from the poison remains in. the wound. It can be recovered and studied microscopically.

“You will recall that I squeezed out drops of fluid from the little punctures both in Valcour’s arm and Neumeyer’s neck. Those glass slides contained starch granules which I have studied carefully under the microscope. Such granules can be recognized definitely, and I have recognized them. Dr. Reichert has made and published a minute study of twelve hundred starches from all sorts of plants and I have taken advantage of the immense amount of labor which he has done. For hours I studied and compared the granules. Dr. Leslie, in spite of what you have learned from the text-books, this poison was aconite—the active principle of which is the terribly deadly drug aconitin.”

No one spoke as Kennedy, his face working with the energy he put into his exposition of the point, carried it through to its conclusion.

“More than that,” he proceeded triumphantly, “it not only proves to have been aconitin which was used as the poisonous agent in these cases, but I am prepared to go even further and to assert that I have been able to recognize the particular variety of starch granules themselves.” He was pointing his long, slender forefinger directly at the buff-brown cylinder which we had forgotten for the moment. “The poison came from that identical piece of arrow-poison, or as I called it, annonoki.”

It was a startling conclusion. In spite of our weariness he had us all keyed up now, as step after step he led us along irresistibly the road to the conclusion which he himself had reached regarding the poison.

“Just what is this annonoki?” inquired Dr. Leslie to whom, as to the rest of us, the name had a strange and romantic sound.

KENNEDY paused a minute contemplatively.

“I am prepared to say positively that it is annonoki—aconite,” he said at length. “I can even say something, as I have already done, of the method by which it was probably administered. But as to the place and the person or persons—” he paused and looked meaningly at Señora Ruiz, whom for the moment the rest of us had forgotten—“as to those questions we must wait until these lips open to solve the problem.

“But as for annonoki itself, it is well-known to many persons. Any one who has traveled has heard of arrow-poisons. In deed that was one of the first things Mr. Sinclair thought about a few moments ago. Annonoki is an Aino arrow-poison.”

Of a sudden there flashed over me the recollection of the peculiar, outlandish servant of Nichi Moto, Otaka, the Aino. True, there did not seem to be anything especially offensive about him, but I was about to pronounce his name, at least to test Kennedy by the expression of his face, when Sinclair interrupted.

“Alvarez was always a great friend of the Japanese who rule the Ainos, a great student in their customs,” he cried. “I have heard much about his friendship for the race.”

Kennedy said nothing, but I knew that he was thinking of the letter which we had taken from the little office out in the hall one night and read by the X-rays. In it Alvarez had been pictured as the friend of the Japanese, perhaps seeking a more cordial relationship between the Mexican and the Jap on the basis of their common origin.

“Yes,” put in Mrs. Hawley, “Alvarez was always intimately concerned with anything Japanese. I have heard him talk of them and with them. It was only when he came to Westport that the Señora and Sanchez brought out the two Japanese—you remember.”

Kennedy was listening carefully to what they said, to see whether it added anything to the testimony of the letter which we had already read about the activities of Alvarez.

“I may as well finish up what I have to say of the arrow-poison,” he remarked at length. “Like so many barbarians, the Ainos from time immemorial have prepared virulent poisons with which they charged their weapons of the chase and warfare.”

He tossed down on the table the short arrow which we had picked up in the curio-shop the day of our visit.

“There is one of their arrows,” he added, “a crude, almost useless, clumsy affair. Merely to confirm what I had heard of their poison, I studied its tip, along that deep blood groove. The current information about such arrows is correct. Formerly the formula for the preparation of the poison, as in the case of most of the arrow-poisons of other tribes, such as curare, were known only to certain members and the secret was passed down from generation to generation as an heirloom, as it were. But those who have studied the thing now tell us that it has been proved that the active principle of this annonoki is the well-known aconite.”

“It was a lucky chance, Kennedy,” exclaimed a familiar voice in the doorway. “My men had already taken him into custody as he stepped off the train in the Grand Central early tonight. Here he is.”

WE TURNED in surprise, to see Burke leading along our friend whom we had seen in the back-room of the greasy South Street saloon on the night when he had sought the gun-runners. It was Morelos, his crisp, curly hair rumpled as if he had not slept for days, but with the same piercing, defiant look about the eyes and cruel mouth.

“He’s the toughest customer I’ve had in a long time,” growled Burke. “I can’t get a word out of him.”

Morelos gazed about in silence. I verily believe that if Kennedy had ordered him shot the next moment he would have gone to his doom in the same defiant manner. His eye fell for the moment on the form of Señora Ruiz. He did not, of course, understand what it all meant. Yet for the moment there was just the flicker of a smile that played over his features at the sight of one of the hated Federals brought low, for whatever reason.

“Morelos,” shot out Kennedy, without waiting a moment for the first surprise to wear off, “I have discovered what it was that caused the death of Madame Valcour.”

Kennedy had thrust him at the only vulnerable spot. Instinctively the man’s muscles tightened, he clenched his fists, two bright spots of passion blazed in his sallow cheeks, and he had to bite his lips to restrain the exclamation that nearly escaped him.

Even though he had not said a word, there was in his actions sufficient confirmation of the letters from the murdered adventuress which we had found in the hidden files of the South Street Junta.

Burke twisted his arm, to remind him that violence here was impossible. Morelos did not even wince. There was savage enough in him to force a contemptuous smile at the pain.

“You see,” ejaculated Burke, “he—he’s a devil!”

“Walter,” said Kennedy quietly, more for its moral effect on Morelos than through any hope that he would get any information, “call up the police and see what the latest is about Sanchez and Alvarez since they left Bridgeport after they had traced Morelos there.”

Morelos had evidently had some experience with the “third degree,” for, beyond a momentary flash of the eye at the words which showed the extent of Kennedy’s knowledge of his movements, he was to be betrayed into nothing more incriminating.

There was, of course, nothing to report as I left the telephone downstairs, and I was trying to frame up something that might further shake Morelos, if that were possible.

As I entered the room, however, Morelos for the moment seemed forgotten. All except Burke were bending over Señora Ruiz.