Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/214

196 "In my opium rooms, neither den nor cellar, I never permitted initiation into the habit of using opium. Novices were barred. Not from altruism, but because I believe in that regulation for my own people and it held with all comers. For I did not draw the color line. Any one who had the price, who regularly used opium, could come, under my rules, and enter their Nirvana. I was a purveyor of dreams, of comfort, of forgetfulness. Nor was the price always necessary nor forthcoming, though I am not a charitable man.

"One man came to me with a certain sum and wished to purchase what you might call an annuity. He was old. Seventy I know him to be. He might live a year, or twenty. If he lived more than two years, I, supplying him with the drug, would lose. Drug insurance you might call it. It is quite a common practice. He was a Mexican, wrinkled as a walnut, half man, half mummy. He ate little. Opiuan was his existence. With it, he dwelled half-way between the ultimate heaven and the earth, like Mahomet in his coffin. Without it, he was a haunted, miserable wretch. He had not the full faculty of his brain. He had suffered a blow in his youth that left some coagulation. In a rich man they would have called it cerebral thrombosis. In his walk of life it stamped him as partly crazy. Nutty Juan, they styled him. Juan Mendoza. He had partial paralysis. When he walked he sidled like a crab.

"But the opium cleared his brain, helped his coordination. Between his second and third pipes