The cocaine was working swiftly now; Lilas had reached the stage of exaggerated self-regard; her enmity toward Melcher grew with unnatural rapidity.  She had evened more than one score in the past, she mused, why not even this one?  In Jarvis Hammon’s case, for instance, she had taken the law into her own hands and had exacted payment for a wrong that most people would have considered dead to vengeance.  Truly, that had been a revenge!  For a long time the memory of that night’s events had been almost intolerable:  the picture of that dim-lit library, of the staring, stricken face of her victim had more than once filled Lilas with such horror that she had taken refuge in double doses of cocaine; but now, strangely enough, she felt no repugnance whatever in looking back upon it.  On the contrary, she was thrilled by the remembrance and exulted in her act without restraint.  She fancied at this moment that she could feel the cold contact of the revolver against her palm, the leap of the exploding weapon, the fierce triumph that had flamed through her when Hammon had halted in his tracks, then withered and crumpled as his wound took effect.  That had been an instant worth all the pain and risk it cost!  She lived again through the white heat of it, but it left her unsatisfied.

There were others who had wronged her and who deserved the same fate as Hammon—­Max Melcher, for instance.  Max had been her evil counselor in all things, he had always used her as a tool, and now, like a tool which he no longer had use for, he cast her aside.

Lilas found herself pacing the floor in a peculiar emotional frenzy.  Outwardly she was cool, inwardly she was a prey to the wildest and wickedest passions.

It is by the use of cocaine that most of the hired assassins of the East Side prepare themselves to kill.  Taken in sufficient quantities, the drug tends to produce a homicidal mania in the consumer, at the same time leaving him in supersensitive control of his faculties.  Mind and body are unnaturally stimulated by it.  Whisky numbs a man’s mind and makes his hands unsteady; cocaine not only crazes him, but lends him accuracy in shooting.  Moreover, it deadens his sensibility, so that he goes on fighting even though riddled with wounds.  Thus the use of this drug explains why the modern gunman is so deadly in his work and at the same time so difficult of capture, as it does the similar phenomena among the Southern negroes who, since they have been denied rum by state prohibition, have taken to cocaine.

Just how or when Lilas arrived at the determination to kill Max Melcher she did not know.  The idea was there, full-grown and firmly fixed in her mind, when she discovered it.  She began at once to shape its execution.

First she called Tony the Barber by ’phone, for now that the Metropolitan Club was closed she knew of no other way of discovering her victim’s whereabouts.  Max was not at the barber shop, she learned, but he would be there promptly at half past six o’clock for his shave.  Yes, Tony declared, he always came there at that time; it was a habit of years’ standing.