“Maybe it’s witchcraft, Jack,” she mocked him.
“Can you change them back?” he asked a little anxiously, and she shook her head.
“No, but they’ll change of themselves in a day or two.”
“I reckon,” commented Dyke Cappeze, looking up from his book by the table, “I oughtn’t to give away feminine secrets, but it’s a right simple matter, after all. She just put some Jimson-weed juice in her eyes and the trick was done.”
“Jimson weed,” echoed the visitor, and the elder nodded.
“If you happen to remember your botany, you’ll recall that its longer name is Datura stramonium—and it’s a strong mydriatic. It swells the pupil and obliterates the iris.”
It was walking homeward with a low moon overhead that evening that Spurrier’s thoughts found time 163 to wrestle with other problems than those affecting himself and Glory. The incident of the black eyes had at first interested him only because they were her eyes, but now he thought also of the episode of the rattlesnakes and the letter from Major Withers.
In his first analysis of what that letter might mean to him he had decided that his man would be recognizable by his mismated eyes. He had recalled Sim Colby’s black ones while thinking of unusual eyes in general and had, in passing, set him down as one who stood alibied.
Now, in the light of this Jimson-weed discovery, those black eyes took on a new interest. Presumably it was a trick commonly known in these hills. If Colby’s eyes had been so altered—and they had seemed unnatural in their tense blackness—it must have been with a deliberate and sufficient motive. Sim Colby was not making his pupils smart and sting as a matter of vanity. A man resorting to disguises seeks first to change the most salient notes of his appearance.
Spurrier recalled, with the force of added importance, the surprised look on Sam Mosebury’s face when that genial murderer, upon his arrival, had stifled some impulse of utterance.