“Yes, I guess so. I guess it’ll be about sundown to-night. There, you forgot to dust that milk-shake. An’ you ain’t touched that shelf o’ patent medicines!”
She set down the last graduate and hung the damp towel on a nail. Then she came out into the main part of the store and sat down comfortably behind the counter.
Long before Mariella was born her father had opened a drug-store in the tiny town of Sehome, on Puget Sound. There was a coal mine under the town. A tunnel led down into it, and the men working among the black diamonds, with their families, made up the town. But there was some trouble, and the mine was abandoned and flooded with salt water. The men went away, and for many years Sehome was little more than a name. A mail boat wheezed up from Seattle once a week; and two or three storekeepers—Mr. Mansfield among them—clung to the ragged edge of hope and waited for the boom. Before it came, Mr. Mansfield was bumped over the terrible road to the graveyard and laid down among the stones and ferns. Then Mrs. Mansfield “run” the store. The question “Can you fill perscriptions?” was often put to her fearfully by timid customers, but she was equal to the occasion.
“Well, I guess I can,” she would say, squaring about and looking her questioner unwaveringly in the eye. “I guess I’d ought to. I’ve been in the store with my husband, that’s dead, for twenty years. I’m not a regular, but I’m a practical—an’ that’s better than a regular any day.”
“It’s not so much what you know in a drug-store as what you look like you know,” she sometimes confided to admiring friends.
It is true Mrs. Mansfield was often perplexed over the peculiar curdled appearance of some mixture—being as untaught in the mysterious ways of emulsions as a babe—but such trifles were dismissed with a philosophical sigh, and the prescriptions were handed over the counter with a complaisance that commanded confidence. The doctor hinted, with extreme delicacy, at times, that his emulsions did not turn out as smooth as he had expected; or that it would be agreeable to find some of his aqueous mixtures tinged with cochineal; or that it was possible to make pills in such a way that they would not—so to speak—melt in the patient’s mouth before he could swallow them. But Mrs. Mansfield invariably laughed at him in a kind of motherly way, and reminded him that he ought to be glad to have even a “practical” in a place like Sehome. And really this was so true that it was unanswerable.
So Mrs. Mansfield held the fort; and as her medicines, although abominable to swallow, never killed any one, she was looked upon with awe and respect by the villagers and the men in the neighboring logging-camps.
Mariella was brought up in the drug-store. She had the benefit of her mother’s experience, and, besides that, she had studied the “dispensatory”—a word, by the way, which Mrs. Mansfield began with a capital letter because of the many pitfalls from which it had rescued her.
“Mariella is such a good girl,” her mother frequently declared; “she got a real good education over at the Whatcom schools, an’ she’s such a help in the drug-store. She does make a beautiful pill.”
Indeed, the girl’s pill-making accomplishment was so appreciated by Mrs. Mansfield that she had nick-named her “Pills”—a name that had been the cause of much mirth between them.