Adventure, December 1914 — page 58: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

I WONDERED what he was driv- ing at. Was there indeed no way, short of the actual fact of sudden death, to prove that they had died of poi- soning, no test, no manner in which the polsonings 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 pos- sibility that the murderer might escape by some technicality was appalling. ‘“‘T have not said there was no test—ab- solutely none,” he remarked quietly. Kennedy paused as he raised this faint spark of hope, then went on: ‘‘T 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 in- dividual from which certain drops of blood came.” “No,” replied Dr. Leslie, “TI 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 mi- nute 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 minutiz 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 ex- tremely inviting subject. Thus, according to modern research, the peculiarities of the starch granules of any plant are quite as dis- tinctive of the plant as are the peculiarities of the hemoglobin crystals of the blood of an animal,” Adventure Dr. Leslie was following him intently now, scepticism overcome. ‘When such a poison as aconite,” pur- sued 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. Former- ly 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 rec- ognized 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 terri- bly deadly drug aconitin.”’ No one spoke as Kennedy, his face work- ing with the energy he put into his exposi- tion of the point, carried it through to its conclusion. “More than that,” he proceeded trium- phantly, ‘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 vari- ety of starch granules themselves.” He was pointing his long, slender forefin- ger 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, anno- nokt.”’ 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. Gomiicovook (©