To be sure, there were
various incidents which seemed to conflict with such a theory, and
the theory itself seemed wild to the point of absurdity; but at least
it was a ray of light in what had been utter darkness. I turned it
over and over in my mind, trying to fit into it the happenings of the
day--I must confess with very poor success. Freylinghuisen's voice
brought me out of my reverie.
"The two cases are precisely alike," he was saying. "The symptoms are
identical. And I'm certain we shall find paralysis of the heart and
spinal cord in this case, just as I did in the other. Both men were
killed by the same poison."
"Can you make a guess as to the nature of the poison?" Hughes
inquired.
"Some variant of hydrocyanic acid, I fancy--the odour indicates
that; but it must be about fifty times as deadly as hydrocyanic acid
is."
They wandered away into a discussion of possible variants, so
technical and be-sprinkled with abstruse words and formulae that I
could not follow them. Freylinghuisen, of course, had all this sort
of thing at his fingers' ends--post-mortems were his every-day
occupation, and no doubt he had been furbishing himself up, since
this last one, in preparation for the inquest, where he would
naturally wish to shine.
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