asts, I
can sing, dance, do anything--and then--every part of my body begins
crying for more of the stuff again."

There was no longer any necessity of concealment from Constance. She
took a pinch of the stuff, placed it on the back of her wrist and
quickly sniffed it. The change in her was magical. From a quivering
wretched girl she became a self-confident neurasthenic.

"I don't care," she laughed hollowly now.

"Yes, I know what you are going to tell me. Soon I'll be 'hunting the
cocaine bug,' as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the
flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals
running around and biting me."

She said it with a half-reckless cynicism. "Oh, you don't know. There
are two souls in the cocainist--one tortured by the pain of not having
the stuff, the other laughing and mocking at the dangers of it. It
stimulates. It makes your mind work--without effort, by itself. And it
gives such visions of success, makes you feel able to do so much, and
to forget. All the girls use it."

"Where do they get it?" asked Constance "I thought the new law
prohibited it."

"Get it?" repeated Adele. "Why, they get it from that fellow they call
'Sleighbells.' They call it 'snow,' you know, and the girls who use it
'snowbirds.' The law does prohibit its sale, but--"

She paused significantly.

"Yes," agreed Constance; "but Sleighbells is only a part of the system
after all. Who is the man at the top?"

Adele shrugged her shoulders and was silent. Still, Constance did not
fail to note a sudden look of suspicion which Adele shot at her. Was
Adele shielding some one?

Constance knew that some one must be getting rich from the traffic,
probably selling hundreds of ounces a week and making thousands of
dollars. Somehow she felt a sort of indignation at the whole thing. Who
was it? Who was the man higher up?

In the morning as she was working about her little kitchenette an idea
came to her. Why not hire the vacant apartment cross the hall from
Adele? An optician, who was a friend of hers, in the course of a recent
conversation had mentioned an invention, a model of which he had made
for the inventor. She would try it.

Since, with Constance, the outlining of a plan was tantamount to the
execution, it was not many hours later before she had both the
apartment and the model of the invention.

Her wall separated her from the drug store and by careful calculation
she determined about