For the moment Major Jen did not ask any more questions, for the very simple reason that he did not exactly know what course to take. Undoubtedly the tramp was telling the truth. He had no reason to conceal it; for in his own mind Jen quite acquitted him of any complicity in the crime. That so feeble and elderly a creature, debauched by intemperance, weak from insufficient food, should attack a vigorous young athlete like Maurice, was out of the question, even though he had the advantage of possessing the devil-stick. But here the question of the dried-up poison occurred to Jen. If the poison had evaporated by the lapse of time, the devil-stick must have been innocuous and incapable of inflicting death. Therefore, upon the evidence of the saturated handkerchief, the bag concealed in the turquoise-studded handle must have been refilled by Dido!--Dido, for the significant reason that she, inheriting the traditions of her Ashantee grandmother, alone must have been capable of manufacturing the deadly drug. To prove this assumption, a feasible one, the devil-stick was close at hand.,
The more Jen thought about the matter the more perplexed did he become. The recovered devil-stick, found in the grounds of Mrs. Dallas, the saturated handkerchief found in the bedroom of the dead man; and now the unaccountable hints of David that he knew something likely to throw a light upon these mysteries, joined with an equally unaccountable refusal to afford such revelation, all these things puzzled him; but as it was impossible in the absence of actual knowledge, to come to any reasonable decision, Jen determined to see Jaggard and see how he was. If Jaggard could only recover his senses, argued the major, he would be able to say who had stolen the body. Moreover, in Jen's opinion, the person who committed the second crime would most probably, by the force of analogous reasoning, have committed the first.,
The major guessed that she meant that African witchcraft would avert disaster from Etwald, and at once flung the word back in her face..
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