Penrod was at first unaware of what lay before him.  Chin on palms, he sat upon the iron rim of a former aquarium and stared morbidly through the open door at the checkered departing back of Della.  It was another who saw treasure in the basket she had left.

Mr. Samuel Williams, aged eleven, and congenial to Penrod in years, sex, and disposition, appeared in the doorway, shaking into foam a black liquid within a pint bottle, stoppered by a thumb.

“Yay, Penrod!” the visitor gave greeting.

“Yay,” said Penrod with slight enthusiasm.  “What you got?”

“Lickrish water.”

“Drinkin’s!” demanded Penrod promptly.  This is equivalent to the cry of “Biters” when an apple is shown, and establishes unquestionable title.

“Down to there!” stipulated Sam, removing his thumb to affix it firmly as a mark upon the side of the bottle a check upon gormandizing that remained carefully in place while Penrod drank.

This rite concluded, the visitor’s eye fell upon the basket deposited by Della.  He emitted tokens of pleasure.

“Looky!  Looky!  Looky there!  That ain’t any good pile o’ stuff—­oh, no!”

“What for?”

“Drug store!” shouted Sam.  “We’ll be partners——­”

“Or else,” Penrod suggested, “I’ll run the drug store and you be a customer——­”

“No!  Partners!” insisted Sam with such conviction that his host yielded; and within ten minutes the drug store was doing a heavy business with imaginary patrons.  Improvising counters with boards and boxes, and setting forth a very druggish-looking stock from the basket, each of the partners found occupation to his taste—­Penrod as salesman and Sam as prescription clerk.

“Here you are, madam!” said Penrod briskly, offering a vial of Sam’s mixing to an invisible matron.  “This will cure your husband in a few minutes.  Here’s the camphor, mister.  Call again!  Fifty cents’ worth of pills?  Yes, madam.  There you are!  Hurry up with that dose for the nigger lady, Bill!”

“I’ll ’tend to it soon’s I get time, Jim,” replied the prescription clerk.  “I’m busy fixin’ the smallpox medicine for the sick policeman downtown.”

Penrod stopped sales to watch this operation.  Sam had found an empty pint bottle and, with the pursed lips and measuring eye of a great chemist, was engaged in filling it from other bottles.

First, he poured into it some of the syrup from the condemned preserves; and a quantity of extinct hair oil; next the remaining contents of a dozen small vials cryptically labelled with physicians’ prescriptions; then some remnants of catsup and essence of beef and what was left in several bottles of mouthwash; after that a quantity of rejected flavouring extract—­topping off by shaking into the mouth of the bottle various powders from small pink papers, relics of Mr. Schofield’s influenza of the preceding winter.

Sam examined the combination with concern, appearing unsatisfied.  “We got to make that smallpox medicine good and strong!” he remarked; and, his artistic sense growing more powerful than his appetite, he poured about a quarter of the licorice water into the smallpox medicine.