arette 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 coarse 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, potassium 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,