themselves were "wanted," would merely lie in self protection, and set us upon false trails. Any woman who had not paid her weekly blackmail money to the ward man was in danger, and few, to judge by their appearance, were not involved in robbery, knock-out drops, or the ubiquitous "badger-game." Yet these, I knew, were the places Boyde would feel at home in. My being a newspaper man proved of value to us more than once, at any rate. My thoughts, as we sat in a curtained corner of some "hell," whose overheated atmosphere of smoke, scent, alcohol and dope was thick enough to cut with a knife, watching, waiting, listening, must be imagined. I watched every arrival. The tension on nerves already overstrained was almost unbearable. A habit of the doctor's intensified this strain. He did not, I think, remember Boyde very well, and was constantly imagining that he saw him. The street door would open; he would nudge me and whisper "Sehen Sie, da kommt der Kerl nun endlich...!" He pointed, my heart leapt into my mouth; nothing could induce me to arrest him, it seemed, and my relief on seeing it was a stranger was always genuine--at the moment.
One night--or early morning, rather--the doctor, who had been silent for a long time, turned to me with a grey, exhausted face. The morphine was beginning to fail him, and he must inject another dose. This happened several times.... Behind a curtain, or in a place aside where we were not even alone, he opened his clothes, found a clear space of skin, and applied the needle, while I rubbed the spot with my finger for about a minute to prevent a blister forming. No one, except perhaps a very drunken man or woman occasionally, paid the smallest attention to the operation; to them it was evidently a familiar and commonplace occurrence.... "You must not stay up any longer," he would say another time, after a sudden examination of my face. "You look dreadful. Come, we will go home."
I was only too glad to be marched off. We paced the
