"But Lady Lee won the race!"
It was McGee, the jockey. Kennedy looked at him a moment, then tapped another beaker on the table before him.
"Weichardt has also obtained, by the usual methods," he replied, "an antitoxin with the power of neutralizing the fatigue properties of the toxin. You thought Lady Lee was not friendly with strangers that morning at the track. She was not, when the stranger jabbed a needle into her neck and pumped an extra large dose of the antitoxin of fatigue into her just in time to neutralize, before the race, the long series of injections of fatigue toxin."
Kennedy was now traveling rapidly toward the point which he had in view. He drew from his pocket the little bottle which he had picked up that night in the cabaret saloon.
"One word more," he said, as he held up the bottle and faced Cecilie Safford, who was now trembling like a leaf ready to fall: "If one with shattered nerves were unable to sleep, can you imagine what would be a most ideal sedative—especially if to take almost any other drug would be merely to substitute that habit for another?"
He waited a moment, then answered his own question.
"Naturally," he proceeded, "it might be, theoretically at least, a small dose of those products of fatigue by which nature herself brings on sleep. I am not going into the theory of the thing. The fact that you had such a thing is all that interests me."
I watched the girl's eyes as they were riveted on Kennedy. She seemed to be fascinated, horrified.
"This bottle contains a weak solution of the toxin of fatigue," persisted Kennedy.
I thought she would break down, but, by a mighty effort, she kept her composure and said nothing.