Uncle Israel was going on the afternoon train, and in another direction. He sat on his trunk and issued minute instructions, occasionally having the whole thing taken apart to be put together in a different kind of a parcel. As an especial favour, Dick was allowed to crate the bath cabinet, though as a rule, no profane hands were permitted to touch this instrument of health. Uncle Israel himself arranged his bottles, and boxes, and powders; a hand-satchel containing his medicines for the journey and the night.
“I reckon,” he said, “if I take a double dose of my pain-killer, this noon, an’ a double dose of my nerve tonic just before I get on the cars, I c’n get along with these few remedies till I get to Betsey’s, where I’ll have to take a full course of treatment to pay for all this travellin’. The pain-killer bottle an’ the nerve tonic bottle is both dretful heavy, in spite of bein’ only half full.”
“How would it do,” suggested Harlan, kindly, “to pour the nerve tonic into the pain-killer, and then you’d have only one bottle to carry. You mix them inside, anyway.”
“You seem real intelligent, nephew,” quavered Uncle Israel. “I never knowed I had no such smart relations. As you say, I mix ’em in my system anyway, an’ it can’t do no harm to do it in the bottle first.”
No sooner said than done, but, strangely enough, the mixture turned a vivid emerald green, and had such a peculiarly vile odour that even Uncle Israel refused to have anything further to do with it.
“I shouldn’t wonder but what you’d done me a real service, nephew,” continued Uncle Israel. “Here I’ve been takin’ this, month after month, an’ never suspectin’ what it was doin’ in my insides. I’ve suspicioned for some time that the pain-killer wan’t doin’ me no good, an’ I’ve been goin’ to try Doctor Jones’s Squaw Remedy, anyhow. I shouldn’t wonder if my whole insides was green instead of red as they orter be. The next time I go to the City, I’m goin’ to take this here compound to the healin’ emporium where I bought it, an’ ask ’em what there is in it that paints folk’s insides. ’Tain’t nothin’ more ’n green paint.”
The patient was so interested in this new development that he demanded a paint-brush and experimented on the porch railing, where it seemed, indeed, to be “green paint.” In getting a nearer view, he touched his nose to it and acquired a bright green spot on the tip of that highly useful organ. Desiring to test it by every sense, he next put his ear down to the railing, as though he expected to hear the elements of the compound rushing together explosively.
“My hearin’ is bad,” he explained. “I wish you’d listen to this here a minute or two, nephew, an’ see if you don’t hear sunthin’.” But Harlan, with his handkerchief pressed tightly to his nose, politely declined.
“I don’t feel,” continued Uncle Israel, tottering into the house, “as though a poor, sick man with green insides instead of red orter be turned out. Judson Centre is a terrible healthy place, or the sanitarium wouldn’t have been built here, an’ travellin’ on the cars would shake me up considerable. I feel as though I was goin’ to be took bad, an’ as if I ought not to go. If somebody’ll set up my bed, I’ll just lay down on it an’ die now. Ebeneezer would be willin’ for me to die in his house, I know, for he’s often said it’d be a reel pleasure to him to pay my funeral expenses if I c’d only make up my mind to claim ’em, an’,” went on the old man pitifully, “I feel to claim ’em now. Set up my bed,” he wheezed, “an’ let me die. I’m bein’ took bad.”
He was swiftly reasoning himself into abject helplessness when Dick came valiantly to the rescue. “I’ll tell you what, Uncle Israel,” he said, “if you’re going to be sick, and of course you know whether you are or not, we’ll just get a carriage and take you over to the sanitarium. I’ll pay your board there for a week, myself, and by that time we’ll know just what’s the matter with you.”