"That, my dear girl, is on the knees of the gods," he returned oracularly.
"How did you find it?" she wanted to know.
"By the simple process of cut and try. And I can assure you that, however bad it may smell or taste, it hasn't anything on some of the leaves I've been chewing this morning."
When the dose was sufficiently cooked Prime fished the leaves out of the liquor with a forked twig, and carried the stew-pan to the brook to take the scalding edge off of the ill-smelling decoction.
"Are you ready to be poisoned?" he asked when he came back.
"You're—you're sure it isn't poison, aren't you?" she quavered.
"No, but I am going to be," and with that he shut his eyes, held his breath, and took a long drink from the stew-pan of fate, disregarding easily, in the frightful bitterness of the draft, Lucetta's little cry of dismay.
"Merely trying it on the dog," he gasped when he put the pan down and turned away so that she should not see the face contortions—grimaces forthshowing the resentment of an outraged palate. Then he went to sit on his blanket-roll to await results. "If—if it doesn't kill me, then you can try it; but—but we'll wait a few minutes and see what it's going to do to me."
When the results proved to be merely embittering and not immediately deadly, he became a nurse again.
"I have left it as hot as you can drink it," he said, offering the basin. "It seems as if it ought to do more good that way. Take a good long swig, if you can stand it."