RGL e-Book Cover©
RGL e-Book Cover©
The Spider, November 1938, with "Corpses on Account"
It was an eerie, blood-chilling procession Doc Turner saw in the night—fiends marching in single file to attend a murder. Somehow, Doc had to find a way to break up that racket that made a cash profit out of men who died on the cross!
IF a certain piece of filter paper, four inches in diameter, had been perfect, Death might have held High Holiday on Morris Street without let or hindrance.
The filter paper was the one Doc Turner set over the orifice of the slope-sided, inverted glass cone of a percolator, tamping down above it exactly the right quantity of fine-ground wild cherry bark intimately mixed with just as exact a quantity of sugar. First thing in the morning he had hung this contraption above a half-gallon graduate and poured into the percolator a quart of distilled water.
All day the water seeped through the ground bark and sugar, dissolving the sugar, extracting from the wood the healing elements a beneficent Nature had matured there, dripping, ruby-glinting now, drop by slow drop through the filter paper at the bottom and into the graduate.
A younger, and more impatient, pharmacist would have laughed at Andrew Turner had he seen this. He would have boiled up the sugar and water and bark to concoct this syrup of wild cherry in an hour—or, more likely, ordered a gallon from some manufacturer. Listening, Doc's thin lips would have moved in a faint and tolerant smile beneath the bushy white droop of his mustache. In a rare, talkative mood he might have explained that he trusted no one but himself to compound the medicaments he had, for more years than he cared to remember, dispensed to the slum-dwellers.
At midnight the old druggist extinguished the electric bulbs in his display window and those that shed a somewhat grimy luminance over the shelves and showcases of his ancient store. His slight, feeble-seeming figure stooped, aquiline countenance deep-lined with weariness and age, hair a silken-white aureole—he shuffled toward the store's back-room to bottle the syrup that must now be ready. Then he would go home to a well-earned rest.
He went through the shabby curtain in the partition doorway, turned left to the long, white-scrubbed dispensing counter, and halted in dismay.
The filter paper at the bottom of the percolator had split, and on top of the liquid in the graduate, that should be clear and red and shining, now floated a scum of ground bark.
Not much had gone through, perhaps a quarter-ounce, and once more the younger pharmacist of whom we have spoken would have skimmed this off and let it go at that. But once more this was not Doc Turner's way. He knew that a microscopic particle or two of the bark, unnoticed, might give the preparation a bitter tang. So, sighing, he got down another graduate from its peg over the sink, and a big funnel. He folded many layers of clean gauze in the funnel, and poured the cough syrup into the funnel to strain.
The syrup was very thick. It would take two hours or more for it to run through. Doc Turner sighed again. He shuffled out through the partition. Not bothering to put on his lights again, he picked up the cane-bottomed chair on which his customers sat to wait for prescriptions, carried it out in front of the street door and seated himself to wait.
THE sidewalks were emptied of the chattering, shawled
housewives that had thronged it through the day and evening, of
the bare-headed, collarless, swarthy aliens. The pushcarts that
had lined Morris Street's curb were gone, though their debris of
rotted vegetables and pulped fruit still cluttered the cobbles of
the gutter, odoriferous to Turner's wide, flaring nostrils.
Overhead sprawled the trestle of the "El," a black and brooding
roof for the slum thoroughfare. A block down a sanitation truck
rattled.
Doc dozed...
Perhaps his sleep was dreamless. Perhaps he dreamed of some adventure on behalf of his people—some foray against the human coyotes who prey on the helpless poor. Many such he had made, for he was far more than druggist and friend to the poverty-stricken, bewildered aliens of Morris Street. At any rate, when he came awake in the smooth, unstartled manner of the old, in his sluggish veins was the sense of something wrong —deadly wrong.
Morris Street was unpeopled and desolate, the drab tenement facades, the dusty-windowed stores, dark—the only light the feeble glow of the street lamps.
There was another light, down at the corner where earlier the sanitation truck had been! A hazy luminance, it wavered curiously across the sidewalk, fitful and somehow ominous.
It spread wider, like a hesitant pool—and abruptly was blotched by such a shadow as made Doc think that he must still be in the grip of a nightmare. The incredible shadow of a cross it was, askew and swaying, and the angle made by one of the shorter arms with the shaft was filled in by the silhouette of a bent, grotesquely malformed figure.
The head of the cross itself came into view, slanted, and then the slanted cross-arms, and bent and staggering under the heavy weight of the shaft he bore on his shoulder, was the figure of a man.
The steel pillars of the "El" stalked between Doc and that vision, and the blue-white glow of a street lamp lay on the stained bricks of a slum-warren. Save for these things he might have been looking at something that passed twenty centuries ago —at an Agony that once was borne in a city called Jerusalem.
The cross wavered for an instant, turned, and was moving again. It was coming, very slowly, toward where the old druggist stood frozen within the entrance doorway of his store. It was fashioned from heavy beams, he could see now, and though its farther end dragged along the sidewalk it was hard to believe that any one man could have the strength to carry it.
The man who carried it, bent almost double beneath its weight, was naked to the waist, and his feet were bare. Doc could make out his face only as a pallid oval, but there were dark streaks on that paleness, and they seemed to dribble from a dark something that circled the man's brow.
On either side of the bearer of the cross a yellow flower blossomed in the dark. They were flames flickering atop tall, white tapers, and the tapers were carried by two whose tall forms were robed in black, and whose faces were hidden by flaps depending from black hoods. There were other lights behind them, of candles borne by other figures—a growing single file of figures that turned the corner to follow behind the cross-bearer and his hooded companions.
Those in that long file were not hooded nor robed. They were naked to the waist and bare-footed...
THEY came on slowly, and in silence, and so utterly
incongruous to their mundane surroundings that Andrew Turner
could not quite believe that he saw them, could not quite make
himself believe that the strange procession was real.
This was still coming on, slow and relentless. Doc could see now that the men who marched in single file were bent a little forward from the waist. They seemed to be holding their tapers in their left hands, for the flames were steady, while the right shoulders of the silent marchers appeared to jerk in a curious slow cadence with the slow, silent tread of their feet—and with the slow flap, flap, flap that did not belong to the night-noises of the city—and somehow was frightening.
Doc could see the face of him who was bent under the cross more clearly now. It was drawn and gaunt with suffering. The dark streaks on it glistened now, and there could no longer be doubt of what they were, for Doc could see that they came from wounds in the man's brow made by the barbs studding the crown he wore.
There was something other than agony in the man's face. There was a curious look of exaltation and joy...
He stumbled as he came to the curb, and would have fallen had not the hooded figure to his right moved and caught the cross with a black-gloved hand and briefly taken some of the weight from him. They were crossing the street now. In moments they would come opposite the drugstore's doorway and spy its owner.
The realization prickled Doc's skin with a sudden chill panic, so that he stepped backward through the open door and closed it swiftly, soundlessly, between him and the night. The door was wood-framed glass, so he could still see through it.
Rays from the candles flickered on the glass, and the candlelight wavered on the cracked sidewalk outside, and then the head of the procession was framed by the door, and went by. The first of the followers appeared, and went by, and Andrew Turner saw why it was that the man was bent a little forward, and what made the flap, flap he had heard. His throat went dry with horror.
The man's torso was bent forward to receive the blows of a short-handled, wire-lashed whip in the right hand of the one behind him, whose back in turn was lashed by the man following. Back after back passing before Doc was flayed to ribbons by those whips, and streaming scarlet.
They were slow, drawing blows that cut the slashes—blows delivered in a leisurely rhythm, a deliberate, measured cadence that was more cruel, somehow, and more vicious than any frenzied beating would have been.
They passed, one by one, bearing their tapers, receiving their lashes, a full dozen of them. In the wavering glow of the tall candles they carried with such unbelievable steadiness, their faces, glistening with sweat, were olive-hued, and black-eyed, and alight with that same weird exaltation the bearer of the cross had worn.
It was not until the last had drifted silently past his door-window and trailed from sight, that Doc could move at all.
THE old man stumbled blindly, then, to the telephone
booth that was near the door, fumbling in his pocket for a
nickel. His numbed fingers found and dropped it three times
before he finally got it out and into the slot.
"Police headquarters," he demanded. "Quick." And then, when a voice rasped gruffly in his ears, he spilled his tale in tones so unlike his own that he almost thought someone else was speaking.
He had to repeat the story, to identify himself, to assure the sergeant over and over that he was not drunk, that he was not insane, before the fellow consented to believe him. It was perhaps all of five minutes before, going back toward his door, Doc heard the distant scream of a radio patrol siren.
The siren was nearer by the time he'd opened that door again, and reached the sidewalk. The headlights of the green roadster were in sight, and coming fast, when he looked up Morris Street in the direction taken by the weird procession.
And that was the only thing in sight that was moving. Save for the onrushing car he'd summoned, Morris Street was desolate, as deserted as it always was in the small hours.
The police bus rocketed up. "They must have gone around one of the corners," Turner exclaimed before the uniformed men leaning from it could speak. He was on the running-board, one blue-veined hand gripping a door-edge. "Swing around and go back, slowly at each cross-street. If you'll keep that damn siren of yours hushed, we may be able to spot their lights."
Some note of apprehension, of dread, in his voice made them obey without argument.
"Hold it!" Doc's exclamation was sharp. "What's that? Halfway to the river?"
The hard-eyed, blunt-jawed officer peered, narrow-lidded, in the direction of the old druggist's pointing finger. Then, "Geez," the driver breathed. And in the pallid glow of a street lamp his knobbed face was abruptly green.
The cross was stuck bolt upright in a rock-filled barrel in the very center of the roadway. His arms outstretched along the horizontal beam, his ankles crossed over one another, the man who had staggered under its weight hung from it now—hung from huge spikes that had been driven through his palms and through his crossed ankles into the wood of the cross.
He'd been alive when that was done, as the blood that had gushed from the wounds testified. But he was silenced by death now, and a slitted stab wound in his left breast showed how he'd died.
Tacked to the head of the cross was a paper, and on the paper were words crudely printed in crayon:
IN ATONEMENT IS LIFE ETERNAL
"I'VE watched Ramon Dias grow up," Doc Turned said, his
tone flat, intonationless. "I've seen him out there every day,
his white teeth flashing in his olive face as he wrapped up his
avocados and his chili peppers. His pushcart was always freshly
painted and clean, and his weights were always right. He worked
hard and he was making a good living. I can't understand how he
could possibly have become involved in any such fanatic
sect."
"Sect, Doc?" Against glare striking into the drugstore from the bulbs hung over the Morris Street pushcarts, about nine of the following evening, Jack Ransom seemed squat and burly. "What sect are you thinking of?" Carrot-headed, square-jawed, powerfully built, the young garage mechanic was Andrew Turner's good right fist in his adventures on behalf of the people of the slum. "Are there more lunatics like that around?"
"Not around this city, till now," the old man answered, his acid-stained fingers drumming on the edge of the showcase. "But in the Southwest, in New Mexico, they've flourished for a long time. The Penitentes, they're called. They lash each other with whips of cactus in a sort of religious ecstasy, and on their high holidays they crucify one of their number. They're all eager to die like that. It's esteemed a great privilege."
"Some privilege." Ransom's grin was twisted, and there was no humor in his eyes. "You mean to tell me they've let nuts like that keep on pulling their stunts any length of time! What's the matter with the cops out there?"
"The officers of the law in the communities where the Penitentes hold forth are either members of the sect or terrorized by them," Doc said. "Even to witness one of their processions is the equivalent of a sentence of death in its most cruel form. A couple of years ago a feature writer for one of the magazines went out there to investigate them. His body was found out on the desert, and a friend of his who took the trip to identify and bring it back for burial spent six months in a sanitarium before he recovered from what he saw."
"Nice birds to play around with," Jack commented. "Say! That's not so pretty for you. You saw that parade last night. If they find out you did—"
"They've found out." Doc smiled bleakly. "They know who reported them to the police. The headquarters sergeant did plenty of talking to the reporters. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that Ramon Dias was crucified last night, and that more of our neighbors will die the same way."
"You think those Penitentes have taken hold of our friends, then?"
"Not those, Jack—not the true ones from the Southwest," Doc said. "You know well enough how often some alien superstition has been brought here to Morris Street, and how it has always turned out that those behind them have been working out a scheme that will profit them in terms of dollars and cents."
"I know how we've always licked them too," Ransom growled. "And we'll lick this one too. What's more, a little birdie seems to tell me you've got an idea how to go about it."
Turner's fingers stopped drumming. "The glimmering of one, perhaps, though I'm not sure. Did you notice, son, that someone has already taken Ramon's spot, out there along the curb? And that he's using Ramon's cart?"
"Yeah. I was just talking about him with the boys. He says he's Dias' cousin. Seems to have proved it too, at least to the bird that runs the pushcart garage in the basement around on Hogbund Lane. I understand he showed a policy on Ramon's life, made out to him."
"Yes," Doc murmured, the bleak look in his eyes growing bleaker and colder still. "A policy for five hundred dollars. I never knew that Ramon had any relatives, this side of Mexico at any rate."
"You mean—"
"I mean that I'd like to find out what someone would see if he accidentally ripped the shirt from Garcia Dias' back."
There was a grim sort of joy in Jack's grin. "Now would you, Doc?" He pushed stubby, spatulate fingers through his carrot shock of hair. "You know I'm not a drinking man—but I kind of have a yen to pay a visit to the gin mill on the corner."
"That," Andrew Turner agreed, "sounds to me like an impulse you ought not resist. I'll be seeing you later, lad." He watched his young friend stride out.
The Syrup of Wild Cherry he'd stayed up so late to strain had to be poured into three ounce bottles, corked, neatly capped, and labeled. Winter was on its way, and there would soon be coughs galore on Morris Street.
Pensively, the white-haired pharmacist wondered if he would see that winter, hear those coughs. The odds were rather heavily against it tonight. To make those odds a little more even, Doc Turner made certain arrangements before he began his task.
JACK RANSOM may not have been a drinking man, but an hour
or so after this conversation, shoving out of O'Malley's Grill
and Bar, his gait was none too steady and there was a distinct
aroma of alcohol about him.
The throng on the sidewalk did their best to clear a path for him. But Ransom became tangled with a baby carriage piled with boxes of chewing gum, gumdrops, and such-like articles of merchandise. He extricated himself from this mess only to reel sidewise toward a pushcart attended by one Garcia Dias. Curiously enough he seemed deaf to Dias' shrill expostulations till he bumped shatteringly into said cart, caromed off this and into Dias himself. The shock of the collision seemed to rob the youth's legs of strength to support him. He started to go down, and, in an heroic effort to save himself from this final catastrophe, one of his flailing hands snatched at the collar of the olive-hued huckster's shirt—the huckster, in the meantime, somehow having been twisted around with his back to the intoxicated youth.
Now the shirt, while of good fabric, was hardly fashioned to sustain a weight of some one hundred sixty odd pounds, forcefully applied. It did the only thing it could do. It ripped.
Ransom's fingers, not content with the damage they had already done, contrived to strip their victim's undershirt halfway down Dias' back as Jack sagged to the pavement.
That back was striped by angry red weals descending diagonally from its right shoulder!
The jostling crowd was vastly amused by Jack Ransom's thick-tongued but abject apologies when he regained his feet. Dias himself was not so much amused, though his dancing rage was mollified by the five-dollar bill Jack thrust into his hand.
Nevertheless, Jack thought it the better part of wisdom to wander on down to the waterfront and dally another hour before, all vestiges of his intoxication gone, he returned to Doc's store to report the result of his little stunt. That made the time a little after eleven. Morris Street was emptying again. Some of the peddlers had already departed. Others, Dias among them, were nailing tarpaulins over their carts so as to protect their contents against tomorrow's business. The lights, however, were still on in Turner's store. Ransom went in, went toward the rear.
"Doc," he called. "Hey, Doc."
There was no reply.
"Doc!" Jack called again. "Where are you?" He went past the end of the sales counter at the rear, jerked aside the curtain in the aperture through the partition behind it. "Doc! Oh, Good Lord!"
Doc Turner wasn't in the back-room. No one at all was in the back-room. On the dispensing counter a half-dozen of the three-ounce bottles ranged there were overturned, a ruby syrup running from them to make a pool on the floor.
At the other end of the narrow room a side door, never used, was not quite closed.
"They've got him," Jack Ransom groaned. "They have got the Doc." His eyes, a smolder of black flame, were fastened on the jamb of that side door, on the raw, splintered gouge that told him the story. One of them coming in through this partition, a powerful jimmy making short work of the old lock there to admit another, the druggist had been caught between two fires, had had no chance to fight or escape. They'd taken him out into the side street, that was neither well lighted nor peopled, had hustled him into a car and taken him... All this had happened not very many minutes ago—the spilled cough syrup, there, was still dripping from the counter to the floor.
Jack turned on his heel. He pounded stiff-kneed out again through the store, out again into Morris Street.
Garcia Dias, tacking a tarpaulin over the pushcart he'd inherited from his "cousin", felt bruising fingers sink into his forearm.
"You're coming with me," a voice thudded in his ears. "You're coming somewhere where we can have a nice, quiet talk, all alone with each other."
HANDS fumbled at the back of Doc Turner's head, stripping
the blindfold from his eyes. At first he could only blink into a
blurred dazzle. Then he saw that he stood at the center of a
large but low-ceilinged chamber.
The light came from a hundred-watt bulb directly over his head. This was shaded, in some manner, so that, though Doc stood in a blaze of illumination, the ends of the room were black with shadow. That shadow was alive. There was movement in it. There was the glint of white eyeballs. There were men, many men, in that darkness. Doc could smell them—the rancid tang of their oily bodies. He could smell their breaths, tainted with some peculiar, evasively familiar odor.
But he could not hear them. They seemed to be crouched there in the blackness, watching him in a fearful silence. They were like a wolf-pack that has surrounded its prey and waits for its leader to start the rush that will drag their victim down.
Directly in front of Doc was something that heightened the impression of open spaces, of a watching wolf-pack. It was green, the height of a tall man, and serried with needle-pointed spines. It reminded Doc of pictures of barrel cactus that he'd seen. But the barrel of this cactus was split open, and the hollow half cylinders were folded apart on a vertical hinge. The keen spines serried the concave insides of the barrel, and they were so long that when the barrel was closed they would interlace, and, despite the green paint that covered them, Doc Turner knew barrel and spines were fashioned of steel.
He had time only to observe this, and shudder inwardly at the grim implication of its design, when a black shadow detached itself from the shadows beyond it. It was no shadow, but a man, robed and hooded as those had been who had marched on each side of Ramon Dias staggering under the cross on which he had been crucified. This was not either of those, Doc decided. He was taller than either had been. And on the breast of his robe was embroidered a scarlet cross—a cross whose arms dripped scarlet drops.
The smell on the breaths of those who remained in the shadows bothered Doc. It was vaguely familiar, but he could not name it. It vexed him that he could not name it. He had an odd feeling that if he could name it he would learn something he ought to know.
The robed man came within a foot of Doc, and paused. Doc could see the glitter of his eyes through two holes in the mask that hung from his hood to cover his face. Those eyes were on Doc's face.
"Andrew Turner." The voice was hollow and unearthly. "You stand before Pontius Pilate to be judged."
"So that's what you call yourself," Doc said, in his own calm, quiet tones. "It isn't exactly a name I'd expect anyone to choose of his own free will, but there's no accounting for tastes."
"Silence!" Pilate boomed. "Your turn will come to speak—till then, you will remain silent." His head moved a bit, so that it seemed to Doc he was looking beyond him. "Of what is this man accused?"
"Of looking upon the procession of the penitents with an irreverent gaze." The voice from behind Doc was tainted with a Latin accent. "Of interfering with the Calvary of one who was chosen to make atonement for our great sin and thus to attain eternal life, so that the consummation of his agony was unseemly hurried." Doc hadn't much chance to inspect the men who'd rushed in on him before they'd gotten the blindfold over his eyes, but he'd certainly seen olive-skinned hands. "Of scheming to interfere further with the devotions of our brotherhood, to the end that eternal life may be denied to those who seek it through flagellation of one another for the sin we committed on Golgotha, through payment by agony for the agony of Him who suffered in the Place of the Skull."
DOC turned to take a better look. He didn't get it. The
two men standing behind him had gotten into black robes and hoods
somewhere, probably in the car that had brought him here, bound,
gagged and blindfolded. They were the two he had seen last night,
but they didn't have candles in their hands now. They had whips,
short-handled and wire-lashed like those with which the marchers
had beaten one another. They were ugly weapons. An unarmed man
would be able to make little headway against them.
And then there were those who crouched in the shadows... What was that smell on their breaths?
"Andrew Turner!" Pilate's hollow boom brought Doc's attention back to him. "You have heard the accusations brought against you. Do you deny them?"
"Of course I don't deny them," Doc said. "I saw your parade last night. I called the police. And I have every intention of breaking up your organization before it does any more damage." He might have been telling some worried mother what to give her baby for a stomachache, for all his tone indicated. There was no defiance in it, no pleading for mercy. He was stating facts, only that.
That very calmness seemed to put the man who called himself Pilate at a loss. He was silent for a long moment.
In that moment Doc turned to the watching shadows. "Listen," he cried. "Listen to me. I can't see you, but I know who you are. I know you're my neighbors, my people. And you know me. You've come to me with your illnesses and your troubles, and I've cured them. I've fought for you, many long years. Many long years have you known me, and you know that I have never lied to you."
Why weren't the hooded men trying to stop him? Why were they letting him talk?
"I'm not lying to you now," he hurried on. "These maskers are the ones who are lying to you. They've played on your religion and your superstition. They've promised you eternal life, in exchange for a few moments of pain. And they've fooled you into taking out insurance in their favor, into making them heirs of your little businesses, or paying them tribute out of those little businesses. They're making themselves wealthy out of your seeking for God."
There was no response from the watchers in the shadows. No movement at all.
Abruptly, Doc knew why he wasn't being interfered with, why he was being permitted to make this speech. He knew why Ramon Dias had willingly, exultantly, borne the cross on his back and then died on that cross.
The smell told him. Its name had come to him. Cannabis... marijuana. They were drugged with marijuana, these people whom he was trying to save from their own folly. Robbed by a drug of their wills, and their wills seized by those who exploited them...
He turned back to Pilate, his arms going out from his sides in a gesture of defeat.
"Andrew Turner," boomed the man with the bleeding cross on his breast, as though nothing at all had happened. "You have been accused, and you have confessed, and I condemn you to the death of the cactus." He stepped aside and gestured to the needled contrivance before Doc. "Enter willingly, or you'll be flogged into it. Choose."
There was sound now from the dark edges of the room. A chorus of eager whimpers, as though indeed wolves were there who strained at some leash to be at their victim.
"I choose neither!" Doc cried, triumphantly. His hands flashed to the side pockets of his jacket, flashed out again with two large glass bulbs in them. "You should have searched me before you brought me here." He inhaled a deep breath, crushed the thin-walled bulbs in his hands, sweeping about so as to spray their contents, puffing at once into the vapor, into the faces of all three of the black-robed men.
They leaped for him, the two with the whips. Something was wrong! They should have dropped, stunned at once by the compound in those ampules he'd so carefully prepared against this moment. Instead they were unaffected. Their whips were whistling about Doc, were cutting in his face, his upraised arms, forcing him back, back, into the embrace of that damned green thing!
And its halves were closing on him, slowly, while the terrible lashes of those whips danced before him, cutting off his escape, holding him there. The needles had caught his clothing now, pierced it, slowly with a dreadful slowness, entering his flesh. They were nearing his eyes now...
The human wolves were leaping out of the shadows, to be restrained no longer. His neighbors. The people whom he'd served, for whom he'd fought all these years. They were rushing to be in at his death, his terrible death, these needles piercing his flesh, sieving him!
They were rushing past him, and there were shouts, screams. Orange-red flashes were lancing the air, gunshots thundering. Pilate dropped, as did the two other black-robed forms. The needles weren't moving any longer. They'd stopped closing on him.
"Doc!" It was Jack's great shout. "Doc! Are you all right?" Jack fighting toward him, out of a melee of policemen, of clubs rising and falling, of fighting, snarling Penitentes. "Thank God, we're in time."
The cactus was opening. The needles were moving away from Doc's eyes that they had not quite entered, from his flesh...
Into a giddy blackness Doc Turner fell, feeling the embrace of strong, young arms before oblivion quite claimed him.
"I TOOK that Garcia Dias down into a cellar on Hogbund
Lane," Jack explained grimly, "and before I got through with him
he was begging to tell me where the hangout of these
Penitentes was, and the password. Then I got me a squad of
cops and we busted in. That's all there is to it."
"That's all," Doc Turner said feebly. "All it did was save me from that—that..." He shuddered, lying there on the hospital bed. "Jack, I'm an old man, and I'm ready to die, but I didn't want to die that way."
"You slipped up for once, didn't you, Doc?" The carrot-headed youth grinned affectionately down at his white-haired friend. "Maybe that will teach you not to be so all-fired sure of yourself hereafter, getting me out of the way so I wouldn't interfere with your making murder bait of yourself."
"Yes, Jack," Doc admitted. "I slipped up this time." His brows knitted. "And I can't figure out why the stuff didn't work. It—Oh, good Lord!" His gnarled hands thrust down on the bed, shoved his wasted body up to a sitting position. "That's it! Of course that's it. The marijuana! They were all high with it, and that counteracted the effect of the... I've got to remember that next time. I've got to figure out something for the next time."
"The next time." Jack Ransom shook his head sadly. "Yeah. I suppose there will be a next time and a next, till you kick out at last."
"Well," Andrew Turner smiled. "That won't be very long now. And I'll kick out, as you so elegantly phrase it, quite content to go. Because I'll know that I'm not leaving my people friendless. Because I'll know that I'm leaving someone behind to take care of them as I've tried to do, all these long years."
He was happy.