Hal, half to himself.

"It's all in the trade," cried Certina Charley, summoning his powers to
a defense. "There's lots that's worse. There's the cocaine dopes for
catarrh; they'll send a well man straight to hell in six months. There's
the baby dopes; and the G-U cures that keep the disease going when right
treatment could cure it; and the methylene blue--"

"Stop it! Stop it!" cried Hal. "I've heard enough."

Alcohol, the juggler with men's thoughts, abruptly pressed upon a new
center of ideation in Certina Charley's brain.

"D'you think I like it?" he sniveled, with lachrymose sentimentality.
"I gotta make a living, haven't I? Here's you and me, two pretty decent
young fellers, having to live on a fake. Well," he added with solacing
philosophy, "if we didn't get it, somebody else would."

"Tell me one thing," said Hal, getting to his feet. "Does my father know
all this that you've been telling me?"

"Does the Chief _know_ it? _Does_ he? Why, say, my boy, Ol' Doc
Surtaine, he _wrote_ the proprietary medicine business!"

Misgivings beset the optimistic soul of Certina Charley as his guest
faded from his vision; faded and vanished without so much as a word of
excuse or farewell. For once Hal had been forgetful of courtesy. Gazing
after him his host addressed the hovering waiter:--

"Say, Bill, I guess I been talkin' too much with my face. Bring's
another of those li'l bo'ls."

CHAPTER XXX

ILLUMINATION

Certina Charley, plus an indeterminate quantity of alcohol, had acted
upon Hal's mind as a chemical precipitant. All the young man's hitherto
suppressed or unacknowledged doubts of the Certina trade and its head
were now violently crystallized. Hal hurried out of the hotel, the wrath
in his heart for the deception so long wrought upon him chilled by a
profounder feeling, a feeling of irreparable loss. He thought in that
moment that his love for his father was dead. It was not. It was only
his trust that was dying, and dying hard.

Since that day of his first visit to the Certina factory, Hal's
standards had undergone an intrinsic but unconscious alteration. Brought
up to the patent medicine trade, though at a distance, he thought of it,
by habit, as on a par with other big businesses. One whose childhood is
spent in a glue factory is not prone to be supersensitive to odors. So,
to Harrington Surtaine, those ethical and moral difficulties which would
have bulked huge to one of a different training, w