“Excuse me a minute,” I says. I went up front. “Do you see him?” I says.
“Ain’t you done yet?” he says. “Maybe you better come up here and watch and let me do that consulting.”
“Maybe you’ll lay a egg,” I says. I come back. She is looking at me. “Of course you realize that I could be put in the penitentiary for doing what you want,” I says. “I would lose my licence and then I’d have to go to work. You realize that?”
“I ain’t got but ten dollars,” she says. “I could bring the rest next month, maybe.”
“Pooh,” I says, “ten dollars? You see, I can’t put no price on my knowledge and skill. Certainly not for no little paltry sawbuck.”
She looks at me. She don’t even blink. “What you want, then?”
The clock said four to one. So I decided I better get her out. “You guess three times and then I’ll show you,” I says.
She don’t even blink her eyes. “I got to do something,” she says. She looks behind her and around, then she looks toward the front. “Gimme the medicine first,” she says.
“You mean, you’re ready to right now?” I says. “Here?”
“Gimme the medicine first,” she says.
So I took a graduated glass and kind of turned my back to her and picked out a bottle that looked all right; because a man that would keep poison setting around in a unlabelled bottle ought to be in jail, anyway. It smelled like turpentine. I poured some into the glass and give it to her. She smelled it, looking at me across the glass.
“Hit smells like turpentine,” she says.