I recalled the strained feeling between the two women that I had noticed in the cab. Was it Mrs. Langhorne who had been the disturbing influence, whose power she feared, over herself and over her husband?
Rapport had fallen back a step, but not from the mind of Kennedy.
“Here,” challenged Craig, facing the group and drawing from his pocket the glass ampoule, “I picked this up at the Red Lodge last night.”
He held it out in his hand before the Rapports so that they could not help but see it. Were they merely good actors? They betrayed nothing, at least by face or action.
“It is crotalin,” he announced, “the venom of the rattlesnake—crotalus horridus. It has been noticed that persons suffering from certain diseases of which epilepsy is one, after having been bitten by a rattlesnake, if they recover from the snake bite, are cured of the disease.”
Kennedy was forging straight ahead now in his exposure. “Crotalin,” he continued, “is one of the new drugs used in the treatment of epilepsy. But it is a powerful two-edged instrument. Some one who knew the drug, who perhaps had used it, has tried an artificial bite of a rattler on Veda Blair, not for epilepsy, but for another, diabolical purpose, thinking to cover up the crime, either as the result of the so-called death thought of the Lodge or as the bite of the real rattler at the Lodge.”
Kennedy had at last got under Dr. Vaughn’s guard. All his reticence was gone.
“I joined the cult,” he confessed. “I did it in order to observe and treat one of my patients for epilepsy. I justified myself. I said, ‘I will be the exposer, not the accomplice, of this modern Satanism.’ I joined it and—”
“There is no use trying to shield anyone, Vaughn,” rapped out Kennedy, scarcely taking time to listen. “An epileptic of the most dangerous criminal type has arranged this whole elaborate setting as a plot to get rid of the wife who brought him his fortune and now stands in the way of his unholy love of Mrs. Langhorne. He used you to get the poison with which you treated him. He used the Rapports with money to play on her mysticism by their so-called death thought, while he watched his opportunity to inject the fatal crotalin.”
Craig faced the criminal, whose eyes now showed more plainly than words his deranged mental condition, and in a low tone added, “The Devil is in you, Seward Blair!”