the Certina millions was not in the Certina secrets:
that he did not wholly understand the nature of his father's trade, and
view it with the same jovial cynicism that inspired the old quack.

"Who's to match him?" he challenged argumentatively. "I tell you, they
all go to school to him. There ain't one of our advertising tricks, from
Old Lame-Boy down to the money-back guarantee, that the others haven't
crabbed. Take that 'People's Doctor' racket. Schwarzman copied it for
his Marovian Mixture. Vollmer ran his 'Poor Man's Physician' copy six
months, on Marsh-Weed. 'Poor Man's Doctor'! It's pretty dear treatment,
I tell you."

"Surely not," said Hal.

"Sure _is_ it! What's a doctor's fee? Three dollars, probably."

"And Certina is a dollar a bottle. If one bottle cures--"

"Does _what_? Quit your jollying," laughed Certina Charley unsteadily.

"Cures the disease," said Hal, his suspicions beginning to congeal into
a cold dread that the revelation which he had been unconfessedly
avoiding for weeks past was about to be made.

"If it did, we'd go broke. Do you know how many bottles must be sold to
any one patron before the profits begin to come in? Six! Count them,
six."

"Nonsense! It can't cost so much to make as--"

"Make? Of course it don't. But what does it cost to advertise? You think
I'm a little drink-taken, but I ain't. I'm giving you the straight
figures. It costs just the return on six bottles to get Certina into Mr.
E.Z. Mark's hands, and until he's paid his seventh dollar for his
seventh bottle our profits don't come in. Advertising is expensive,
these days."

"How many bottles does it take to cure?" asked Hal, clinging desperately
to the word.

"Nix on the cure thing, 'bo. You don't have to put up any bluff with me.
I'm on the inside, right down to the bottom."

"Very well. Maybe you know more than I do, then," said Hal, with a grim
determination, now that matters had gone thus far, to accept this
opportunity of knowledge, at whatever cost of disillusionment. "Go
ahead. Open up."

"A real cure couldn't make office-rent," declared the expert with
conviction. "What you want in the proprietary game is a jollier.
Certina's that. The booze does it. You ought to see the farmers in a
no-license district lick it up. Three or four bottles will give a guy a
pretty strong hunch for it. And after the sixth bottle it's all velvet
to us, except the nine cents for manufacture and delivery."

"But it must be