"No, I won't. I'll pay mine, which is the salary you were hired for. You have one wife in Cripple Creek"—he started, and grasped the back of a chair—"it was foolish of you to marry the circus woman too. Bigamy is still a crime," and I felt quite satisfied with myself as I noted the effect of this. "Well," I thought, "when it comes to playing melodrama with a drug fiend, you are not bad, Ted!" His hands shook, but he managed to light another cigarette.
"Ted, I've been drinking," he mumbled, with an ugly grin that ought to have warned me he wasn't through. "I don't know what I've been saying"—he staggered to his feet and offered his lean scraggy hand—"I'm a good friend of yours, Ted. I always have been. You forget the wife in Cripple Creek—and we'll mix up the Texas formula."
I took his hand, feeling quite triumphant. "Knowlton will be proud of me," I thought.
"I'll forget either wife you say—or both," I said. "Let's get to work."
"That's it. Work. You're a good fellow, Teddy," and he lurched toward the shelves of bottles. "You thought I'd thrown it away?" he turned with his leer again. "You're wrong, Ted. I'm too old a fox for that, eh? Here it is," and he handed me a blue glass bottle with a rubber cork. "Right under your nose all the time, and you didn't know it."
I snatched it eagerly from him, and he chuckled. I was so certain that I was carrying all before me no suspicion crossed my mind.
"Analyze it, Ted, if you don't trust me," he urged.
"It's only business if I do," I replied.
"That's right—get it down in black and white. I never remember formulas."
I poured a little into a test tube; in colour and appearance it was as I remembered it to be. He took the tube from me and lightly passed it back and forth through a Bunsen flame. The liquid bubbled and began to give off fumes whose odour was queer—unlike what I expected. I felt dizzy for a moment, but recovered.