For a moment I didn’t myself attribute the odor to its true source, and was puzzled. “What’s that smell?” I asked.

“What smell?” Cap Huff wanted to know. He turned his head from side to side, sniffing. “Everything smells all right to me.”

“Maybe,” Nason said, “it’s Doc’s asafoetida bag.”

“Yes, I guess that’s it,” Cap agreed. “I remember I used to smell it some when I first got to know him. If you can learn to stand it at all, the more you get to know him, the more you get over it.” He looked at us patronizingly. “Doc has to wear an asafoetida bag around his neck on account of his health. It ain’t nothing to worry about, so just roll up your sleeves.”

We did so, and Doc Means wavered forward to stare placidly at our upper arms with weak blue eyes. With a trembling hand he dusted at my biceps, as if to free them of a non-existent web: then turned to Nathaniel.

I considered him careless as well as helpless; for in the dusting, he scratched me, which was not pleasing, since his fingernails were less clean than some I had seen. In my own mind I set him down as a doddering old fool and wondered how Nason could seem to set store by him. Indeed, I thought the man little better than half-witted; for when he had fumbled at Nathaniel’s arm, he appeared to forget about us and stood staring at the rum bottle out of eyes that seemed half blind.

“Pour yourself a glass of rum if you like,” I said.

He shook his head and spoke in a flat, weak voice. “I don’t touch it, hardly ever. What kind is it?”

He picked up the bottle and smelled of it, looking at it inquiringly. Then, as if the more readily to smell it, he poured a glass half full. “What kind is it?” he asked again. “I seldom touch it.” With that he lifted the glass and the rum vanished. He set down the glass, shaking his head. “Not any more,” he said in a faint voice. “It don’t have a good effect on me—likely to make me eat too much.”

He looked at Nason meekly. “Cap says you want me to be off for Wells.” He turned and moved toward the door, walking with that wavering gait which was not a limp, and suggested decrepitude, not lameness.

“Here,” I said, “why doesn’t he give us the smallpox?”

“You got it,” Nason said. “What’s the matter with your eyes?”

I looked at my arm. There was a red welt across it. On Nathaniel’s there was a similar welt. Thereupon I stared hard at Doc Means and wondered if I had made a mistake about him.

Doc Means blinked at us. “Good-bye, all,” he said in a whispering voice. He opened the door and went out droopingly.