On her way home Julie happened to pass her former school. The old crone to whom she still came for medicine was standing outside the stall. The girl stopped to speak to her.

The old creature passed her brown bones of fingers over her uncanny face and, staring into the face of the sun, began to mutter strangely again about the search for the Ark. A fantastic being, the girl thought, trudging over the earth after a chimera.

Julie told her that the medicine drove the pain away, but that, because of the heat, perhaps, she could not eat or sleep well, and that there came to her the strangest dreams in the world. In them the earth became transparent—she could see clearly through it. She could see people grow, bit by bit, under her eyes; and the forest, by some deep instinct, knew her, and the flowers laughed and cried like children.

The old woman said that all this was true; that in the old days when she lived in the splendors of the world the jungle used to be very hostile to her and would tear at her with its teeth and sprinkle her with its poisons and set its reptiles against her; but now that she had made friends with it she could go through the heart of it and never be hurt. She described how she plucked her herbs, male and female in equal proportion, out of jungles where no man’s foot had touched, when the benign forces of the air preponderated over the malign.

Julie said that the body was a stupid abiding place after these dreams, which put upon her soul marvelous new moods, like a moon forever at the full.

The old woman clutched at the wheel of the carromata and stared at her with unfathomable eyes. “Why did you not come with me when I asked you?” she entreated. “You and I could have freed ourselves from the wickedness of the earth, which is a heavy black bundle tied to the back of mortals. We would have searched for the lost Covenant between God and Man.”

For an instant a weird vision rose before the girl of the places those footsteps would lead to, down dirty by-ways of the East, catching one’s food where one could, brushing skirts with lepers and thieves, in hazes of furnace heat. Thank heaven, not all the incarnations of the East could bring her to a thing like that! And yet for an instant the preposterous invitation had sent an odd thrill through her. This nondescript old woman had touched her soul.

She smiled sadly, and shook her head, and the witch, dropping back from the wheel, moved away, muttering, “Adios!”

And that was the last of her that Julie ever saw.

A few days later, she returned this way from the SeÑor’s, to obtain a fresh supply of medicine. Only one pellet lay in the box at home. But from the shack opposite the school, the old woman had disappeared, without leaving a sign behind her. Because of the manner of her going, the Stall-keeper was positive that she would never come back.

In frightened dismay, Julie inquired of Mariana and Clarino, both of whom had secretly bought amulets of the old woman—Mariana, to enable herself to withstand the attraction of an unusually eligible lover; and Clarino, to become the principal of a school, to which honor he fearfully aspired. But neither knew anything about her: she was a wandering witch, no doubt, who had perhaps gone away on a broomstick into the sky.

It was through Delphine she received the only light she ever had on the old woman’s going. Disturbed over her disappearance from school, Delphine had sought her out at her quarters. She explained to him that she had been ill, and mentioned that she had not been able to procure any more of a medicine which had brought her great relief, and which she had been in the habit of buying from an old charm-woman near the school, who had mysteriously disappeared.

“Dicky-Dicky sent her away!” Delphine exclaimed excitedly. “I saw him come out suddenly upon her, a few squares from the school, and tell her over and over to go away—that danger threatened several people if she were seen around any more.”

What did the dwarf mean? Delphine did not know, he did not ask Dicky-Dicky questions because he got severely slapped on the head for such efforts.

Gone, taking her secret off with her! That was the way with these people—always under your feet, until some day, at some mysterious signal, they took themselves finally off! Julie thought with terror of all that lay ahead of her, to face unrelieved—the relentless hot season, her perilous hold on a disorganizing community, her bad health. With the aid of the medicine, she had managed to endure and to go unsteadily on, but the thought of trying to continue without it caused her limbs to grow cold. There was not fire nor force enough in her to fight the rest of the way. To her other trials it was impossible to add ceaseless and grilling pain. In a few weeks she might have to go out of this country—and the passage money was nowhere in sight. Something might yet happen to turn her fate. Until then she must find a way to get the medicine.

Old Kantz, the chemist on Calle Alean, had been in the East for forty years. He would be bound to know what the medicine was and to be able perhaps to get more of it. Julie preferred him to SeÑor Reredo whose shop was not far distant. So when SeÑor Sansillo went to Los BaÑos on business she seized the half holiday to go and see Kantz.

As she entered the Botica a native clerk slumbrously uprose behind the counter. It was a hot day. Nobody was about in it but tired, driven Americans who take account of neither day nor night. Julie made clear to him, however, that she must see Kantz at once.

The old chemist was finishing his siesta upstairs, but as he was accustomed to act as an emergency doctor to his neighborhood he came down, clad in white trousers and an undershirt that covered his fat person like his skin. This attire was not really unconventional in a land where attire might follow almost any persuasion of the mind.

He adjusted his huge lenses and nodded professionally to the girl. Julie, wondering at her own precipitancy and unable to set forth any explanation of it to Kantz, began in an uncertain voice. “I have a medicine here—that I have been taking for some time—for very bad head-aches. I can’t get any more of it and I want to see if you can.”

“What is it then?” He poked the pellet with a fat finger.

“I—don’t know!” she stammered uneasily. It seemed so foolish a reply to make in the face of this array of bottles confronting her like so many incontrovertible facts and to Kantz who looked like the biggest bottle and the most absolute fact of all.

“Where did you get it?”

Unable to escape, Julie replied in a lowered voice, “It was given me by—a—a herb woman who had helped people I know—of. She has gone away. I can’t find her. I need the medicine”—with rising spirit and an attempt at dignity—“it’s a native specific.”

“Wait, I will try and analyze it.” He turned into his tiny laboratory, the pellet, the last one, stuck perilously on his moist thumb.

Julie sat down and studied respectfully the irrefutable bottles. The clerk mixed himself a surreptitious drink behind the counter, and fell into gentle extinction.

Finally Kantz’s great shape moved in, and Julie, glancing up, found him looking at her very hard—stare which even before he opened his mouth, threw every cell in her into turmoil.

“Ach! I have lived in the East for forty years, and do you think I do not know all the tricks of your kind?”

The girl tried to be sure that she was not confronting a maniac—but he was so monstrously calm. “What do you mean?” she quavered in fright.

“That you will not get any more of that medicine, here or in any other drug store unless the keeper wishes to go to Bilibid.”1

He employed a threatening, familiar tone. Once she had heard a man speak to a drunkard like that.

“What is the stuff?” she cried wildly. “Is it poison? Tell me at once.”

He turned to his bottles. “These dope fiends!” he muttered exasperated, to them.

“Dope fiends!” the girl repeated stupidly. “A drug! Oh, don’t tell me,” she cried agonizedly, “—it’s—”

“Since the new laws, you will find opium impossible to get. So I tell them all—and they go crazy!”

Julie stared with wildly dilated eyes, her bloodless lips parted as if to protest. Then she fell against the counter. There was a dead hush in the deserted place. Not even a fly buzzed through the scorching silence. Julie tried to lift her paralyzed arms to ward something off. She was dreaming. She had taken too much medicine. Things like this didn’t happen!

But there, blistering her, was the chemist’s cynical gaze. Day by day she had been moving towards this wall—a blind dupe. She had had a sunstroke on Adams’s grave, and an old woman had offered her some medicine for it, and out of this simple sequence destruction had appeared. The avalanche of final ruin swept over the girl’s fevered mind. She had been dragged down—clear down. The slow but inevitable juggernaut of the East had pulled her under at last, “grist for the mill—you and I,” Adams had said long ago. Out of a clear sky had fallen this final, cruel joke.

“What am I to do?” The piteous question seemed, to fall on rather than be directed to the chemist.

“Why then did you begin?”

She repeated her story lamely, disjointedly and in tears, conscious of its futility—Kantz was so fatally incredulous.

“After a time,” he told the bottles, “they cannot tell the truth.”

The girl looked at him with terrible despair.

“You do not believe me—nobody will believe me. Oh!” she caught at her throat and stared at him with the eyes of a caged animal. She clutched at his arms in frantic pleading. “You are as good as a doctor. Give me something that will cure me. I would offer you a lot of money, but I haven’t any. I will not go on always wanting that horrible stuff!”

“It is a long hunger. Sometimes it lasts as long as life.”

“I didn’t mean to get into it—that must count. Help me! I am afraid. You must believe me—I am not a liar! There is a cure for everything—everything,” she cried wildly. “Mrs. Ashby said so—Oh!”

Her head dropped on the counter and she wept uncontrollably.

The chemist stared down at her uncomfortably. “Just stop!” he said. “There is no other way.”

Julie lifted herself up with a dizzy lurch and plunged out of the botica. A strange being in her form walked the streets, which had become a phantasmagoria of horror. Black shapes of doom seemed haunting the avenues of life—she, the blackest shape of all, groping through under-hells for light. She belonged now to the East forever and forever. It had set its stamp of hopelessness upon her. She moved along staring with desperation and repugnance at this dark race with whose fate she had become allied.

She walked without direction, on and on, not knowing where she was going, goaded by an immeasurable despair. She wandered half way across the city, hatless, the sun scorching her head; what goal could there ever be again? All their lives even the few cured struggled, Kantz had said. A cursed pilgrimage the world, to these Wandering Jews of souls! And she wasn’t made for struggle. For a fearful fight like this in which she had only one small, slim chance—she knew in her soul she had not the force. She might struggle a little while, but it was not in her being to combat to the end. It was easier to die—but one didn’t die, that was the worst.

She stood still on a street corner staring blankly about her. There was no use in going on. There was nothing ahead ever, however far she went. She stood there dully and thought of one thing, the flaky thing that had hung to Kantz’s careless finger. Only that would lift a little while this madness of sun, and pain and strangling despair. As she gazed tormentedly about her, her mind suddenly made clear the significance of her surroundings. All this wandering had been a subconscious hunt upon which some dim urgent sense had been leading her—to the one spot where there was a chance of getting what she desired. Chinamen always had it.

The girl paused horror-struck. But against the visions she desperately set up, visions of her youth’s high quest, of a splendid new Empire of Mankind—of a Prince of the East, a throbbing insistence that had never been denied arose and claimed every atom of her being and wiped out every thought. Dim, distant visions they were now. Not one of them could help—or save her. The Hunger consumed every fiber.

Yet the anguish, the urge of her memories assailed her all the while—visions that had stirred her spirit terribly accused; voices, very dear voices pleaded with her wretched soul.

Once that lane had been for her the evilest channel in which she had seen life move. Now her torment swept her onward into its currents. She must get a little—secretly—ever so little, to help her through the woods.

She moved like a sleep-walker, a glazed look on her haunted face, among the little stalls, muttering what she wanted under her breath. Nobody must see her on such an errand in such an unspeakable place. The yellow half-shaven heads leered at her like grinning skulls, and pretended not to know what she wanted. They were uncannily wily, exercising their super-evil intuitions. The laws were very strict. They must make sure of her.

She feared them terribly. The old shadow, like the hangman’s cap, pressed down over her mind as it had done before. She knew what a welter of evil desires her youthful body evoked up and down the street—but she had forgotten her body, everything but this goading of the furies.

She pursued her way among the stalls. It was here and they should not outwit her. The yellowed skulls thrust themselves upon her, their fishy eyes intimating all the wickedness in the world. At one shop the Chinaman appeared to understand. She had put a paper bill upon the counter. He lifted the board that barricaded him behind the counter, and beckoned her to follow. The rear of the shop was black and musty. The Chinaman opened a trap door, and ducked down under the ground. He emerged in a moment with a small package which he held out to her. Julie started forward to get it. The creature’s arm swung out and clutched her. She screamed, but one of the yellow paws dropped over her mouth. Her whole life seemed to go out of her in a final wave of fright. She knew what would happen to her down in that black cavern.

She wrestled against him. He put his hand upon her throat. She could feel to her spine the chill of those yellow fingers compressing her throbbing breath. As she fought away from him, the jade medallion jerked out of her dress. She could feel it on her bosom dancing about wildly. The hold on her throat relaxed. The creature had caught at the amulet with one hand. The girl took wild advantage of his distraction to wrench herself out of his grasp. Diving under the counter she hurled herself into the open street. Nobody was following her, but she fled, with a sobbing cry, through the dust down the center of the street, the denizens of the stalls thrusting out their heads like cobras to stare after her.

She continued to run even after she had gotten into safe districts, on and on like a mad thing. Natives stopped to stare at the white woman run amuck. In her tumult of brain she saw but one vision. Down under the floor of this city, where its black beating heart lay filled with the monstrous passions of men, where a motley evil crew from all the coasts of the East trafficked in human life and flesh, down there she was fated to sink. She had seen her end written on every one of those opium-devastated skulls. Even now she would have been hurled to a rung below hell if the Chinese charm had not diverted her assailant. She had not been saved by her own will nor yet even by an oriental fetish, but by the emblem of one man’s love. She remembered the things she had swept aside to go into that horrible street. Nothing had weighed in the madness of the moment—a moment of hideous impulse that had twisted in devastation every fiber of her being and left it a wrecked thing whose roots a tornado had splintered.

“They that go down to dust!” ran in her fevered brain.

She hurried along, her body shivering, though it was a hot day. Suddenly she saw she was nearing her objective, and stopped to run her feverish, trembling fingers through her pale hair. As she stood in front of SeÑor Reredo’s drug store her heart beat so loudly she feared that he might suspect what was in it.

The Botica, after the native fashion, was broadly open. No barrier must interpose between the native and his passion for the street. The SeÑor, his slim legs, terminated by red slippered feet, curled around the rungs of a high chair, was reading El Progresso, a native organ. He rose when he saw Julie and asked how he could serve her.

She wanted some more of that lotion for tan that he had put up for her. It was more efficacious than anything else she had ever used. She complimented him upon his ability as a chemist; if he should go into business in Spain that ability would be recognized. The SeÑor, gratified, admitted that here among the “Indianos” was no sphere for a man’s brains. They expanded into a discussion of different panaceas. Julie suddenly put her package down on the counter and soberly regarded him.

“SeÑor, my friend Barry says that an epidemic of cholera is breaking out in this city. He says it is spreading like wildfire and that it will be the worst plague, perhaps, that the Islands have known.”

“The plague we have with us always,” the SeÑor replied. “The Americans take it too seriously.”

“It rages in the provinces and it has come heavily to many districts here. Barry is greatly worried. He warned me vehemently—and I am afraid. The water, the food, every mouthful, every swallow means danger. More than anything conceivable I fear the Peste. One suffers horribly and cannot die at once. If one could carry always with one something to bring death quickly! I had a friend once who traveled much on railroads where one is in danger of terrible accidents. Once he was buried under the wreckage of a coach and there came an awful time to him, when he feared they would not get him out. After that he carried tied around his neck always a little sack—three grains of morphine—and he was insured. If you would give me the means—to go—quickly in case I were hopelessly stricken, I would not fear any more.”

The SeÑor stared disquietedly at the counter. “Perhaps, I should have left sooner, I have many children!”

“A teacher who came over on the boat with me has just died of it!” Julie shivered.

“I will tell Sofia!” he muttered, “that it is just as well to go at once. SeÑor Barry knows.”

“But I must stay, SeÑor,” the girl pleaded, “in this terror I have no place to go.”

He meditated. “Well, if it makes you feel safe!” He turned to his drawers. “Three grains! Yes,” he reflected, “that should be right.”

The girl picked up the little box nervously. “Thank you, SeÑor,” she said.