of the felonious
knock-out drops. Each week brought to Braun customers from adjacent
cities, many of whom, disguised or veiled, hurried away with the means
of cowardly crime to work the devil's charms at a safe distance.

Taciturn, morose and keeping his own counsel, Fritz Braun was a
cautious trader with the great supply houses. His bills of purchase
were made out to the welcome "Mr. Cash," and the old prescription
books of Magdal were ostentatiously displayed with a few family
orders dropping in now and then from some befogged physician. The
bond between Lilienthal and Braun had been strengthened by the aid
of the "picture dealer" in smuggling from Hamburg and Bremen much
of the dangerous ware of this mind-wrecking business.

And so, peddling the means of murder, filling his yawning pocketbook,
Fritz Braun had thrived in solitude until Irma Gluyas sought the
refuge of New York City.

For the discovery of her picture in the stiffened hands of a suicide,
a young noble officer, ruined by her extravagance, had caused the
Viennese siren to flee the vengeance of a powerful Austrian family.

And so the lives of these two, linked by folly, sin, crime and mad
extravagance, had run together again far from the scenes where,
led on by her dark eyes, Hugo Landor had stumbled along on the dark
road from theft and forgery to callous murder.

On this particular April early afternoon, the eager plotter was
willing to leave his afternoon customers to the sly Timmins. The
actresses and lazy demi-monde queens fluttered in always before
sunset, together with a bevy of quacks, whose doubtful prescriptions
were always put up by Timmins, easily capable of brazenly swearing
to "a mistake," or denying upon oath the sale of any clumsy weapon
of medical butchery.

It was also the time when the floating "shopping women" drifted in
to reinforce their luncheons with Timmins' artfully veiled alcoholic
preparations.

His row of bottles labelled "Vin Mariani," "Moxie," and "Nervura"
were never empty, and the oldest toper would have found them
veritable "well springs of joy in the desert."

All the simple machinery of the mock pharmacy was so well oiled
that even an expert could detect no commerce more dangerous than
Lubin's Powders, crimson lip salve, or a powder puff.

"Fritz Braun, Manager," came and went with regularity, no man
knowing of his home or family ties; the old golden sign of "Magdal's
Pharmacy" covering whatever mystery