The doctor rolls up two cigarettes and offers me one.
"You will smoke?" asks he.
"No!" says I, "not till I am sixty."
"Let me see your palm and your nails. Humph! Lady, you had better start now as a mere matter of expediency. Why not try this one? Where's the use of a mouth and an index finger if you do not smoke?"
Now, I cannot say why I do not smoke, except that there are so many reasons why I should, and so I return to our first topic and ask, "Does your medicine make the men well again?"
"No, no, decidedly no!" he replies—"they allow me to hold no such illusion. The talismans they carry, work the cure—a bear's tooth, a lucky penny, or the image of a calendar saint. A snake's rattle is a panacea for anything but a broken heart. Time was when men only choked on grape seeds as did the old poet chap, Anacreon, but in these days, the navvies get appendicitis from them. It would be offensive to suggest other causes, in spite of the fact that most of them never taste grapes. No! it would not be right for me to put my patients in the wrong and shockingly poor policy."
"Have you much trouble with drunkenness?" I query.
"Not a great deal!" he makes answer, "for the Mounted Police have a disconcerting habit of probing into bales of hay and of finding false floors in wagons. They have fifty-fox power, these police fellows, although I have heard tell that a gallon or more of whisky has been within roping distance of them and escaped. A bottle that gets by them is worth ten dollars, but the navvies declare whatever it costs it is worth it. But, dear me, there are other liquids for inordinate and uncritical thirsts, such as——"
"Your medicine?" I suggest, whereupon our conversation abruptly ends, for he will be no longer beset by me; and he will not give me a bottle of liniment for "crick" in the back; no, not if I die in Edson, without even a graveyard started wherein to bury me. He supposes Providence knows his business, but how ever woman came to be made is a mystery far beyond his wit's end.
Huh! Huh! I am tingling to scratch this man's eyes out, but I only call him a brown pirate.