XV
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 cigarette
stubs which he had been studying by means of the interferometer.
"Here's your confounded cat," I ejaculated, as I placed the
unhappy feline in a basket and waited patiently until finally he
seemed to be rewarded for his patient labours. It was well along
toward morning when he obtained in a test-tube a few drops of a
colourless, odourless liquid.
"My interferometer gave me a clue," he remarked, as he held the
tube up with satisfaction. "Without the tell-tale line in the
spectrum which I was able to discover by its use I might have been
hunting yet for it. It is so rare that no one would ever have
thought, offhand, I suppose, to look for it. But here it is, I'm
sure, only I wanted to be able to test it."
"So you are not going to try it on yourself," I said
sarcastically, referring to his last experiment with a poison.
"This time you are going to make the cat the dog."
"The cat will be better to test it on than a human being," he
replied, with a glance that made me wince, for, after his
performance with the curare, I felt that once the scientific
furore was on him I might be called upon to become an unwilling
martyr to science.
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