If I have not in this incident sufficiently established the youthfulness of the junior partner, I may add briefly that he was just nineteen, that he had early joined the emigration to California, and after one or two previous light-hearted essays at other occupations, for which he was singularly unfitted, he had saved enough to embark on his present venture, still less suited to his temperament.  In those adventurous days trades and vocations were not always filled by trained workmen; it was extremely probable that the experienced chemist was already making his success as a gold-miner, with a lawyer and a physician for his partners, and Mr. Kane’s inexperienced position was by no means a novel one.  A slight knowledge of Latin as a written language, an American schoolboy’s acquaintance with chemistry and natural philosophy, were deemed sufficient by his partner, a regular physician, for practical cooperation in the vending of drugs and putting up of prescriptions.  He knew the difference between acids and alkalies and the peculiar results which attended their incautious combination.  But he was excessively deliberate, painstaking, and cautious.  The legend which adorned the desk at the counter, “Physicians’ prescriptions carefully prepared,” was more than usually true as regarded the adverb.  There was no danger of his poisoning anybody through haste or carelessness, but it was possible that an urgent “case” might have succumbed to the disease while he was putting up the remedy.  Nor was his caution entirely passive.  In those days the “heroic” practice of medicine was in keeping with the abnormal development of the country; there were “record” doses of calomel and quinine, and he had once or twice incurred the fury of local practitioners by sending back their prescriptions with a modest query.

The far-off clatter of carriage wheels presently arrested his attention; looking down the street, he could see the lights of a hackney carriage advancing towards him.  They had already flashed upon the open crossing a block beyond before his vague curiosity changed into an active instinctive presentiment that they were coming to the shop.  He withdrew to a more becoming and dignified position behind the counter as the carriage drew up with a jerk before the door.

The driver rolled from his box and opened the carriage door to a woman whom he assisted, between some hysterical exclamations on her part and some equally incoherent explanations of his own, into the shop.  Kane saw at a glance that both were under the influence of liquor, and one, the woman, was disheveled and bleeding about the head.  Yet she was elegantly dressed and evidently en fete, with one or two “tricolor” knots and ribbons mingled with her finery.  Her golden hair, matted and darkened with blood, had partly escaped from her French bonnet and hung heavily over her shoulders.  The driver, who was supporting her roughly, and with a familiarity that was part of the incongruous spectacle, was the first to speak.