Page:Henry rideout--The siamese cat.djvu/131

 reaching the hotel again, his first act was to stuff two or three mangoes into his pockets. A friendly chemist in the dispensary stared at his request, disappeared smiling into a tiny laboratory, and returned with a puzzled face, very serious.

"May I ask where you got these?" he said. "Anonymous friend.… Hmm! Quite right to be suspicious … Hydrocyanic acid, squirted full, permeated." He showed, in a strip of the mango skin, a pinhole puncture. "Regular subcutaneous, you see. Prussic enough to kill an elephant, sir."

"Good. Thank you," said Scarlett, laughing. "I don't die to-day. Some Christian friend will be disappointed."

But once outside, he stopped smiling, and acknowledged the chill that had touched his spirit: death, the unreal and remote, had struck short by a fang's breadth. "It was at