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WAIFS AND STRAYS

I don’t know what he ever did with the pocketknife I swapped him for it.

“I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for an annual corn dance. . . .” In the capacity of Dr. Waugh-hoo, Mr. Peles “struck Fisher Hill.” He went to a druggist and got credit for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks, and with the help of the running water from the tap in the hotel room, he spent a long evening manufacturing Resurrection Bitter. The next evening the sales began. The bitters at fifty cents a bottle “started off like sweetbreads on toast at a vegetarian dinner.” Then there intervenes a constable with a German silver badge. “Have you got a city lcense?” he asks, and Mr. Peters’s medicinal activity comes to a full stop. The threat of prosecution under the law for practising medicine without a license puts Mr. Peters for the moment out of business.

He returns sadly to his hotel, pondering on his next move. Here by good fortune he meets a former acquaintance, a certain Andy Tucker, who has just finished a tour in the Southern States, working the Great Cupid Combination Package on the chivalrous and unsuspecting South.

“Andy,” says Jeff, in speaking of his friend’s

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