United States or French Polynesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
There is not, perhaps, much fear that chance shooting will achieve the actual bull's-eye of Ambrotox. But there is a greater danger than commercial rivalry criminal! The illicit-drug interest is growing in numbers and wealth. Every threat of so-called temperance legislation stimulates it. We have lately heard much of crime as a policy.
Ambrotox!" she sighed scornfully. "I wish I'd never given it that pretty name. I think it's horrid stuff!" "That's what I was going to ask," said Dick. "As for publicity, my dear boy," replied Caldegard, "Ambrotox will very probably do more harm than good if its properties become general knowledge.
"But last night I was in bed before twelve; I suppose he took advantage of that and sneaked back to the laboratory again." "But I thought," said Amaryllis, after a pause, "that Ambrotox was finished and ready to make its bow to the public." "God forbid!" said Bellamy, in a tone of such intensity that the girl was astonished.
"This," said Caldegard: "For several years each of those old women had been taking morphia; each had been concealing it from the other; each had suffered in conscience the torture of the damned; each confessed to me her vice, and the dreadful failure of her struggle to overcome it. Experimentally I treated each with Ambrotox, in gradually decreasing doses.
The highest, if not the best known, of its priesthood, is my old friend Caldegard. Some little time ago he penetrated too far into the arcana of his cult; and on one of the branches of that terrific tree he found and coaxed into blossom a bud which grew into the fruit which his daughter has named Ambrotox as if it were a beef essence or a cheap wine.
"The Ambrotox gang," replied her father, lowering his voice almost to a whisper. "The only four people in the world, I believe, who know even that silly nick-name you invented, Amaryllis, are in this house. Sir Randal knows its properties. I know all about it. You know that I have spent two years in reaching it, and Dick Bellamy knows there is something in which we three are deeply interested.
"I thought you'd forgotten it! Ambrotox, of course. I'll tell her, Caldegard. I once heard a man tell his wife, after she'd been chattering to him for twenty minutes, that he'd forgotten to light his pipe all the time she'd been talking. She said it was the best compliment she'd ever had. I shall tell Amaryllis how you forgot Ambrotox."
Almost in despair, she sat trembling on the bed, and thought of her father and of the two Bellamys, and of what they would do, when they caught them, to the men who had stolen Ambrotox and the woman they loved. All the three? Well, two at least. Yet somehow she felt that it would not be surprising if the worst vengeance should be Limping Dick's.
And, turning, he put the Ambrotox and the formula into Caldegard's hand, smiling his crooked smile. "That's the lot," he murmured, and laid his head on his arms, folded upon the table. An uncomfortable pause was broken by the entrance of a constable with a card. "Gentleman wishes to know if Mr. Richard Bellamy is here," he said to the superintendent. But Dick did not move.
And when she laughed, he told her how her father had growled: "Oh, damn the Ambrotox!" and how he had lectured the potentate on nervous exhaustion. But when a little silence fell between them, Amaryllis took a deep breath and plunged, saying in a half-stifled voice, "I want to tell you something."
Word Of The Day