The herbalist, having secured the money and deposited it in his pocket, said, with a malicious grin,

“Couldn’t you, Mr. Woodward, have prevented yourself from going to the expense of five pounds for poisoning a dog, that you could have shot without all this expense?”

Woodward looked at him.  “Your life,” said he, “will not be worth a day’s purchase if you breathe a syllable of what took place between us this night.  Sol Donnel, I am a desperate man, otherwise I would not have come to you.  Keep the secret between us, for, if you divulge it, you may take my word for it that you will not survive it twenty-four hours.  Now, be warned, for I am both resolute and serious.”

The herbalist felt the energy of his language and was subdued.

“No,” he replied, “I shall never breathe it; kill your dog in your own way; all I can say is, that half a glass of it would kill the strongest horse in your stable; only let me remark that I gave you the bottle to kill a dog!”

“Now,” thought Barney Casey, “what can all this mean?  There is none of the dogs wrong.  He is at some devil’s work; but what it is I do not know; I shall watch him well, however, and it will go hard or I shall find out his purpose.”

As Woodward was about to depart he mused for a time, and at length addressed the herbalist.

“Suppose,” said he, “that I wish to kill this dog by slow degrees, would it not be a good plan to give him a little of it every day, and let him die, as it were, by inches?”

“That my bed may be made in heaven but it is a good thought, and by far the safest plan,” replied the herbalist, “and the very one I would recommend you.  A small spoonful every day put into his coffee or her coffee, as the case may be, will, in the course of a fortnight or three weeks, make a complete cure.”

“Why, you old scoundrel, who ever heard of a dog drinking coffee?”

“I did,” replied the old villain, with another grin, “and many a time it is newly sweetened for them, too, and they take it until they fall asleep; but they forget to waken somehow.  Taste that yourself, and you’ll find that it is beautifully sweetened; because if it was given to the dog in its natural bitter state he might refuse to take it at all, or, what would be worse and more dangerous still, he might suspect the reason why it was given to him.”

The two persons looked each other in the face, and it would, indeed, be difficult to witness such an expression as the countenance of each betrayed.  That of the herbalist lay principally in his ferret eyes.  It was cruel, selfish, cunning, and avaricious.  The eye of the other was dark, significant, vindictive, and terrible.  In his handsome features there was, when contrasted with those of the herbalist, a demoniacal elevation, a satanic intellectuality of expression, which rendered the contrast striking beyond belief.  The one appeared with the power of Apollyon, the god of destruction, conscious of that power; the other as his mere contemptible agent of evil-subordinate, low, villanous, and wicked.