"Lying down is the devil ... when you're in for a
real bad night. You might get me the brown cigarettes ... on the
table in there. That's right ... thanks awfully ... and now a match!"
The asthmatic had bitten off either end of the stramonium cigarette,
and was soon choking himself with the crude fumes, which he inhaled
in desperate gulps, to exhale in furious fits of coughing. Never
was more heroic remedy; it seemed a form of lingering suicide; but
by degrees some slight improvement became apparent, and at length
the sufferer was able to sit upright, and to drain his glass with a
sigh of rare relief. I sighed also, for I had witnessed a struggle
for dear life by a man in the flower of his youth, whose looks I
liked, whose smile came like the sun through the first break in his
torments, and whose first words were to thank me for the little I
had done in bare humanity.
That made me feel the thing I was. But the feeling put me on my
guard. And I was not unready for the remark which followed a more
exhaustive scrutiny than I had hitherto sustained.
"Do you know," said young Medlicott, "that you aren't a bit like
the detective of my dreams?"
"Only to proud to hear it," I replied.
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