CHAPTER XIII THE SMALLPOX MEDICINE
Next morning Penrod woke in profound depression of spirit, the cotillonominous before him. He pictured Marjorie Jones and Maurice, graceful andlight-hearted, flitting by him fairylike, loosing silvery laughter uponhim as he engaged in the struggle to keep step with a partner about fouryears and two feet his junior. It was hard enough for Penrod to keepstep with a girl of his size.
The foreboding vision remained with him, increasing in vividness,throughout the forenoon. He found himself unable to fix his mindupon anything else, and, having bent his gloomy footsteps toward thesawdust-box, after breakfast, presently descended therefrom, abandoningHarold Ramorez where he had left him the preceding Saturday. Then, as hesat communing silently with wistful Duke, in the storeroom, coquettishfortune looked his way.
It was the habit of Penrod's mother not to throw away anythingwhatsoever until years of storage conclusively proved there would neverbe a use for it; but a recent house-cleaning had ejected upon the backporch a great quantity of bottles and other paraphernalia of medicine,left over from illnesses in the family during a period of several years.This debris Della, the cook, had collected in a large market basket,adding to it some bottles of flavouring extracts that had provedunpopular in the household; also, old catsup bottles; a jar or two ofpreserves gone bad; various rejected dental liquids--and other things.And she carried the basket out to the storeroom in the stable.
Penrod was at first unaware of what lay before him. Chin on palms, hesat upon the iron rim of a former aquarium and stared morbidly throughthe open door at the checkered departing back of Della. It was anotherwho saw treasure in the basket she had left.
Mr. Samuel Williams, aged eleven, and congenial to Penrod in years,sex, and disposition, appeared in the doorway, shaking into foam a blackliquid within a pint bottle, stoppered by a thumb.
"Yay, Penrod!" the visitor gave greeting.
"Yay," said Penrod with slight enthusiasm. "What you got?"
"Lickrish water."
"Drinkin's!" demanded Penrod promptly. This is equivalent to the cry of"Biters" when an apple is shown, and establishes unquestionable title.
"Down to there!" stipulated Sam, removing his thumb to affix it firmlyas a mark upon the side of the bottle a check upon gormandizing thatremained carefully in place while Penrod drank.
This rite concluded, the visitor's eye fell upon the basket deposited byDella. He emitted tokens of pleasure.
"Looky! Looky! Looky there! That ain't any good pile o' stuff--oh, no!"
"What for?"
"Drug store!" shouted Sam. "We'll be partners----"
"Or else," Penrod suggested, "I'll run the drug store and you be acustomer----"
"No! Partners!" insisted Sam with such conviction that his host yielded;and within ten minutes the drug store was doing a heavy business withimaginary patrons. Improvising counters with boards and boxes, andsetting forth a very druggish-looking stock from the basket, each of thepartners found occupation to his taste--Penrod as salesman and Sam asprescription clerk.
"Here you are, madam!" said Penrod briskly, offering a vial of Sam'smixing to an invisible matron. "This will cure your husband in a fewminutes. Here's the camphor, mister. Call again! Fifty cents' worth ofpills? Yes, madam. There you are! Hurry up with that dose for the niggerlady, Bill!"
"I'll 'tend to it soon's I get time, Jim," replied the prescriptionclerk. "I'm busy fixin' the smallpox medicine for the sick policemandowntown."
Penrod stopped sales to watch this operation. Sam had found an emptypint bottle and, with the pursed lips and measuring eye of a greatchemist, was engaged in filling it from other bottles.
First, he poured into it some of the syrup from the condemned preserves;and a quantity of extinct hair oil; next the remaining contents of adozen small vials cryptically labelled with physicians' prescriptions;then some remnants of catsup and essence of beef and what was leftin several bottles of mouthwash; after that a quantity of rejectedflavouring extract--topping off by shaking into the mouth of thebottle various powders from small pink papers, relics of Mr. Schofield'sinfluenza of the preceding winter.
Sam examined the combination with concern, appearing unsatisfied. "Wegot to make that smallpox medicine good and strong!" he remarked; and,his artistic sense growing more powerful than his appetite, he pouredabout a quarter of the licorice water into the smallpox medicine.
"What you doin'?" protested Penrod. "What you want to waste thatlickrish water for? We ought to keep it to drink when we're tired."
"I guess I got a right to use my own lickrish water any way I want to,"replied the prescription clerk. "I tell you, you can't get smallpoxmedicine too strong. Look at her now!" He held the bottle up admiringly."She's as black as lickrish. I bet you she's strong all right!"
"I wonder how she tastes?" said Penrod thoughtfully.
"Don't smell so awful much," observed Sam, sniffing the bottle--"a gooddeal, though!"
"I wonder if it'd make us sick to drink it?" said Penrod.
Sam looked at the bottle thoughtfully; then his eye, wandering, fellupon Duke, placidly curled up near the door, and lighted with the adventof an idea new to him, but old, old in the world--older than Egypt!
"Let's give Duke some!" he cried.
That was the spark. They acted immediately; and a minute later Duke,released from custody with a competent potion of the smallpox medicineinside him, settled conclusively their doubts concerning its effect. Thepatient animal, accustomed to expect the worst at all times, walked outof the door, shaking his head with an air of considerable annoyance,opening and closing his mouth with singular energy--and so repeatedlythat they began to count the number of times he did it. Sam thought itwas thirty-nine times, but Penrod had counted forty-one before other andmore striking symptoms appeared.
All things come from Mother Earth and must return--Duke restored muchat this time. Afterward, he ate heartily of grass; and then, over hisshoulder, he bent upon his master one inscrutable look and departedfeebly to the front yard.
The two boys had watched the process with warm interest. "I told you shewas strong!" said Mr. Williams proudly.
"Yes, sir--she is!" Penrod was generous enough to admit. "I expect she'sstrong enough----" He paused in thought, and added:
"We haven't got a horse any more."
"I bet you she'd fix him if you had!" said Sam. And it may be that thiswas no idle boast.
The pharmaceutical game was not resumed; the experiment upon Duke hadmade the drug store commonplace and stimulated the appetite for strongermeat. Lounging in the doorway, the near-vivisectionists sipped licoricewater alternately and conversed.
"I bet some of our smallpox medicine would fix ole P'fessor Bartet allright!" quoth Penrod. "I wish he'd come along and ask us for some."
"We could tell him it was lickrish water," added Sam, liking the idea."The two bottles look almost the same."
"Then we wouldn't have to go to his ole cotillon this afternoon," Penrodsighed. "There wouldn't be any!"
"Who's your partner, Pen?"
"Who's yours?"
"Who's yours? I just ast you."
"Oh, she's all right!" And Penrod smiled boastfully.
"I bet you wanted to dance with Marjorie!" said his friend.
"Me? I wouldn't dance with that girl if she begged me to! I wouldn'tdance with her to save her from drowning! I wouldn't da----"
"Oh, no--you wouldn't!" interrupted Mr. Williams skeptically.
Penrod changed his tone and became persuasive.
"Looky here, Sam," he said confidentially. "I've got 'a mighty nicepartner, but my mother don't like her mother; and so I've been thinkingI better not dance with her. I'll tell you what I'll do; I've got amighty good sling in the house, and I'll give it to you if you'll changepartners."
"You want to change and you don't even know who mine is!" said Sam, andhe made the simple though precocious deduction: "Yours must be a lala!Well, I invited Mabel Rorebeck, and she wouldn't let me ch
ange ifI wanted to. Mabel Rorebeck'd rather dance with me," he continuedserenely, "than anybody; and she said she was awful afraid you'd asther. But I ain't goin' to dance with Mabel after all, because thismorning she sent me a note about her uncle died last night--and P'fessorBartet'll have to find me a partner after I get there. Anyway I bet youhaven't got any sling--and I bet your partner's Baby Rennsdale!"
"What if she is?" said Penrod. "She's good enough for ME!" This speechheld not so much modesty in solution as intended praise of the lady.Taken literally, however, it was an understatement of the facts andwholly insincere.
"Yay!" jeered Mr. Williams, upon whom his friend's hypocrisy was quitewasted. "How can your mother not like her mother? Baby Rennsdale hasn'tgot any mother! You and her'll be a sight!"
That was Penrod's own conviction; and with this corroboration of ithe grew so spiritless that he could offer no retort. He slid to adespondent sitting posture upon the door sill and gazed wretchedly uponthe ground, while his companion went to replenish the licorice water atthe hydrant--enfeebling the potency of the liquor no doubt, but makingup for that in quantity.
"Your mother goin' with you to the cotillon?" asked Sam when hereturned.
"No. She's goin' to meet me there. She's goin' somewhere first."
"So's mine," said Sam. "I'll come by for you."
"All right."
"I better go before long. Noon whistles been blowin'."
"All right," Penrod repeated dully.
Sam turned to go, but paused. A new straw hat was peregrinating alongthe fence near the two boys. This hat belonged to someone passing uponthe sidewalk of the cross-street; and the someone was Maurice Levy.Even as they stared, he halted and regarded them over the fence with twosmall, dark eyes.
Fate had brought about this moment and this confrontation.
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