“Where did you get it?”
Unable to escape, Julie replied in a lowered voice, “It was given me by—a—a herb woman who had helped people I know—of. She has gone away. I can’t find her. I need the medicine”—with rising spirit and an attempt at dignity—“it’s a native specific.”
“Wait, I will try and analyze it.” He turned into his tiny laboratory, the pellet, the last one, stuck perilously on his moist thumb.
Julie sat down and studied respectfully the irrefutable bottles. The clerk mixed himself a surreptitious drink behind the counter, and fell into gentle extinction.
Finally Kantz’s great shape moved in, and Julie, glancing up, found him looking at her very hard—stare which even before he opened his mouth, threw every cell in her into turmoil.
“Ach! I have lived in the East for forty years, and do you think I do not know all the tricks of your kind?”
The girl tried to be sure that she was not confronting a maniac—but he was so monstrously calm. “What do you mean?” she quavered in fright.
“That you will not get any more of that medicine, here or in any other drug store unless the keeper wishes to go to Bilibid.”[1]
He employed a threatening, familiar tone. Once she had heard a man speak to a drunkard like that.
“What is the stuff?” she cried wildly. “Is it poison? Tell me at once.”