“Pretty rotten cigar,” Doctor Emory observed, having removed it from contact with Kwaque’s finger and now examining it with critical disapproval.  He held it close to his nose, and his face portrayed disgust.  “I won’t say cabbage leaves.  I’ll merely say it’s something I don’t know and don’t care to know.  That’s the trouble.  They get out a good, new brand of cigar, advertise it, put the best of tobacco into it, and, when it has taken with the public, put in inferior tobacco and ride the popularity of it.  No more in mine, thank you.  This day I change my brand.”

So speaking, he tossed the cigar into a cuspidor.  And Kwaque, leaning back in the queerest chair in which he had ever sat, was unaware that the end of his finger had been burned and roasted half an inch deep, and merely wondered when the medicine doctor would cease talking and begin looking at the swelling that hurt his side under his arm.

And for the first time in his life, and for the ultimate time, Dag Daughtry fell down.  It was an irretrievable fall-down.  Life, in its freedom of come and go, by heaving sea and reeling deck, through the home of the trade-winds, back and forth between the ports, ceased there for him in Walter Merritt Emory’s office, while the calm-browed Miss Judson looked on and marvelled that a man’s flesh should roast and the man wince not from the roasting of it.

Doctor Emory continued to talk, and tried a fresh cigar, and, despite the fact that his reception-room was overflowing, delivered, not merely a long, but a live and interesting, dissertation on the subject of cigars and of the tobacco leaf and filler as grown and prepared for cigars in the tobacco-favoured regions of the earth.

“Now, as regards this swelling,” he was saying, as he began a belated and distant examination of Kwaque’s affliction, “I should say, at a glance, that it is neither tumour nor cancer, nor is it even a boil.  I should say . . . "

A knock at the private door into the hall made him straighten up with an eagerness that he did not attempt to mask.  A nod to Miss Judson sent her to open the door, and entered two policemen, a police sergeant, and a professionally whiskered person in a business suit with a carnation in his button-hole.

“Good morning, Doctor Masters,” Emory greeted the professional one, and, to the others:  “Howdy, Sergeant;” “Hello, Tim;” “Hello, Johnson—­when did they shift you off the Chinatown squad?”

And then, continuing his suspended sentence, Walter Merritt Emory held on, looking intently at Kwaque’s swelling: 

“I should say, as I was saying, that it is the finest, ripest, perforating ulcer of the bacillus leprae order, that any San Francisco doctor has had the honour of presenting to the board of health.”

“Leprosy!” exclaimed Doctor Masters.

And all started at his pronouncement of the word.  The sergeant and the two policemen shied away from Kwaque; Miss Judson, with a smothered cry, clapped her two hands over her heart; and Dag Daughtry, shocked but sceptical, demanded: