"Calabar?" I repeated, in surprise. "Why, that's a place on the west coast of Africa, isn't it? What would a Calabar bean be lying on the floor here for?"
"What do you mean—ordeal bean?" questioned Doyle, somewhat incredulously, while Leslie maintained a discreet silence.
"In the Calabar, where these things grow," explained Kennedy, not put out for an instant, "as you perhaps know, they have a strange form of dueling with these seeds. Two opponents divide a bean. Each eats a half. It is some religious ceremony—voodoo, or some such thing, I suppose—a superstition. Sometimes both die—for the bean contains physostigmine and is the chief source from which this drug is obtained."
"You mean they eat it—a poison?" I asked.
"Certainly. Over there, the natives believe that God will decide who is guilty and who is innocent, and that he will miraculously spare the innocent. I suppose that sometimes one gets a half a bean that doesn't contain so high a percentage of the poison—or else some people are not so susceptible to its toxin, or something like that. Anyhow, that's one way they use it."
"Why," I exclaimed, "that is primitive justice, you might say—the duel by poison!"
"Exactly," Craig nodded.
Doyle stared, amazed and puzzled.
"No worse than some of the things our ancestors did, not many centuries ago," reminded Craig. "They used to have all sorts of ordeals, by fire and water and what not. We haven't progressed so far over the savages, after all. Civilization is only a veneer, and pretty thin, sometimes. Underneath we're quite like the savage—only we substitute mechanical war for brute strength and high finance for highway robbery. The caveman and the cavewoman are in all of us—only we manage either to control them or conceal them—except when something happens that means calling in either Doyle or myself."
"What's this—phy—physos—what you call it?" demanded Doyle, forgetting to conceal his ignorance in his curiosity.