Within a short time Wallingford had the satisfaction of seeing bill-boards covered with his big sign ordering the public to “Laugh at That Woozy Feeling,” but not yet telling them how to do it, and he heard people idly wondering what the answer to that advertisement was going to be. Some of them resented having puzzles of the sort thrust in front of their eyes, others welcomed it as a cheerful diversion. Wallingford smiled at both sorts. He knew they would remember, and firmly link together the mystery and the solution. Cards bearing the same mandate stared down at every street-car rider, and newspaper readers found it impossible to evade the same command. All this advertising, for the appearance of which Wallingford had waited, helped him to sell the stock to pay for itself, and, in the meantime, he was busy [Pg 332]putting into his new factory a bottling plant, second in its facility if not its capacity, to none in the country. He installed magnificent offices and for the doctor prepared an impressive private apartment, this latter being a cross between an alchemist’s laboratory and a fortune-teller’s oriental salon; but alas and alack! the first day the doctor walked into his new office he had his hair close-cropped and wore a derby, with such monstrous effect that even Wallingford, inured as he was to most surprises, recoiled in horror!

From that moment the doctor became a hard one to manage. His first protest was against the Benson House, the old-fashioned, moderate-rate hotel which he had always patronized and had always recommended wherever he went. Thereafter he changed boarding-houses and family hotels about every two weeks; but he never had his hair cut after the once. The big mixing vats that Wallingford installed he grew to hate. He was used to mixing his Sciatacata in a hotel water-pitcher and filling it into bottles with a tin funnel; and to mix up a hundred gallons at a time of that precious compound seemed a cold, commercial proposition which was so much a sacrilege that he went out and [Pg 333]“painted the town,” winding up in a fight with a cigar-store Indian. He left such a train of fireworks in his wake that Wallingford heard of it for weeks afterward.

To J. Rufus the affair was a good joke, but to the other gentlemen of the company, Corbin, Paley and Doctor Lazzier and the others who had social reputations to maintain as well as business interests to guard, the affair was tragic, not merely because one of their number had become intoxicated, but that it should be this particular one, and that he should make himself so conspicuous! The doctor repeated his escapade within a week. This time he took a notion to “circulate” in a cab, and as he got more mellow, insisted upon sitting up with the driver, where he whooped sonorously every time they turned a corner. This time he finished in the hands of the police, and Wallingford was called upon at three o’clock in the morning to bail him out. Friends of Corbin and Paley and the other exclusives whom Wallingford had selected as his stock-holders began to drop in on them with pleasant little remarks about their business associate. The doctor had been bragging widely about his connection with them!

[Pg 334]

His crowning effort came when he continued his celebration of one night through the next day, and drove around to make a few party calls. He appeared like a specter of disgrace in Corbin’s private office with:

“Hello, old pal, come out and have a drink!” and gave Corbin a hearty slap on the back.

Corbin gave a helpless glance across at the three prim young ladies on the other side of his open screen. Back of him a solemn-visaged old bookkeeper, who was both a deacon and Sunday-school superintendent, looked on in shocked amazement.

“Couldn’t begin to think of it, Doctor,” protested Corbin nervously, pulling at his lavender cravat, while the perspiration broke out upon his bald spot. “I must attend to business, you know.”

“Never mind the business!” insisted the doctor. “Wait till our Sciatacata factory is shipping in car-loads, partner, and you can afford to give this junk-shop away.”

Paley, happening in to speak to Corbin, created a diversion welcome to Corbin but unwelcome to himself, for the doctor immediately pounced upon Paley and insisted upon taking him out to get a drink, and the only way that narrow-framed young [Pg 335]man could get rid of him was to go along. He rode around in the cab with him for a while, and tried to dissuade him from calling upon Doctor Lazzier and the other stock-holders, but Quagg was obdurate. To wind up the evening’s performance he appeared on a prominent street corner about nine o’clock, in a carriage with the gasolene torch and the life-size anatomical chart, and began selling the Peerless Sciatacata, calling upon the names of Wallingford, Lazzier, Corbin and Paley—his “partners”—as guarantees of his sincerity and standing, and as sureties of the excellence of the priceless compound.

Wallingford heard about him quickly, for the picturesque Quagg had become a public joy and all the down-town crowd knew well about him. Wallingford went down to the corner with the intention of putting a stop to the exhibition, but, as he looked at the doctor, whose hair now dropped beneath his sombrero to nearly its old-time length, a new thought struck him and he went quietly away. The next day Corbin withdrew from the treasurership and Paley from the directorate, and every one of the directors who had taken............