Fritz Braun, left alone, stooped and picked up a little piece of paper which had fluttered down on the floor at his feet. He was careful to "leave no black plume as a token."
And now there was not a vestige left of his past nefarious traffic. "Timmins can do no harm now," sneeringly laughed Fritz Braun. "For I carry these things in my head, and he must trust to some member of the craft. What blockheads these fat-witted English practitioners are."
Braun's hollow laugh echoed from behind the flowing false beard, as he read over the faded prescriptions he had idly picked up. It was a powerful agent of evil—a tool of the deadly thug.
"By God! I may need this old friend. How did I come to forget it? It may purchase my safety, or else give some poor devil peace and rest."
"My last appearance on any stage," he muttered, as his hands were soon busied with the familiar phials around him. "I'll have a few doses of this 'Sinner's Friend' with me," he muttered. "Who knows where I may not need it. It is the only paralyzer."
Seizing a three-ounce flask, he cast aside his blue goggles for a moment as he measured his ingredients. One by one he carefully added them, until the small bottle was filled with a colorless mixture.
He read the innocent-looking scrawl a last time, and then burned it at a fluttering gas jet. The words seemed burned in upon his brain. His practiced glance ran over the bottles on the shelves ranged there like soldiers in their silent ranks. His eye gleamed vindictively as he murmured: "First, my old friend chloral hydrate—there you are. Now, your reliable brother, chloroform"—He shook up the growing mixture with a secret pride. "Just the right amount of muriate codine"—There was a pause, as the codine dissolved with the other ingredients. "And now," he gaily murmured, "distilled water," the last element needed to bind these together as a water of death. It is a royal secret of the rogue's pharmacy—the best garment for a flitting soul, tasteless and painless.
"Warranted to fit the largest man or the smallest boy," laughed the scoundrel, replacing his goggles, as he fitted a ground-glass stopper tightly to the flask. "I am not particularly anxious to be caught with this on me. It would mean two to five years of 'voluntary assistance' to the State at Sing Sing. But one little well-regulated dose of this soothing charm, and the strongest man drops helpless at my feet."
Braun slipped it in an inner pocket, and passed out, with a careless nod to the overjoyed Timmins. "Remember, Lilienthal is your only adviser. Six months from now, I'll put a new life into things here."
When Braun had disappeared, Ben Timmins drained a brandy and soda to his eternal discomfiture. "'Ere's 'oping the bloomin' ship founders with the old beggar," growled the Londoner, who had noted Braun sweep away the last thirty dollars in the till. "'E might have left me a few pennies."