Page:Weird Tales Volume 6 Number 1 (1925-07).djvu/32

Under the ghastly glare of a swinging street lamp two human derelicts met. The first was a youth with an aged and dissipated face, and at the first sight of the man from the alleyway he stopped with a low whistle. It was answered, and the other night wanderer beckoned from beyond the light. The second man might have been fifty. He looked sixty-five. The drawn face, pinched and distorted with suffering, told the secret. The youth knew that it was a drug face, and the light of the lamp told him what it was. Morphine!

"Well, kid," breathed the older man in a tense whisper, "slip me the junk!"

Broadway Charlie looked down at the derelict's trembling and twisted hand and broke into a dismal laugh. The fellow was clutching a five dollar bill.

"So you got fooled, too," he said. "I've been waiting on this corner for two hours."

The drug addict groaned, and then peered into the wild eyes of the youth with a look of sudden hopefulness.

"Cocaine, eh?"

"God, yes," whined Broadway, "and I haven't had a whiff for days. Just took a flyer at the Tombs, and I've been waiting for Whispering Willie. He’s ditched me, or else he's pinched. For a few grains of snow, I'd—"

"Yes, I know," snarled the older man. "You've got it easy—if it was morphine, or heroin, you'd know what it is to suffer. I'll die, sure as the devil, if I don't get it pretty soon. If something's happened to our peddler we've got to get it somewhere else, that's all! What time is it, kid?"

Broadway shook his head with a scowl.

"Soaked," he explained. "It's about 1 o'clock, though. Not much chance, out this way at this time of night."

"Then we'll make a chance," gritted the derelict.

He introduced himself as Tim the Spotter, and explained that he had arrived in the city only a few days before. Here he had met the dope peddler, who had promised to deliver two cubes of the "poppy", on the corner at midnight. He whispered that he had been on the lookout since 11 o'clock, and knew of a place where some dope—both cocaine and morphine, perhaps—could be stolen. It was the office of a physician, he told the youth, and the last time he had passed that way he had noticed that