Then he drew a cigarette from
one of his pockets, and struck a match. Tom Reade, slipping up
behind the youngster, deftly took the cigarette away from him,
tossing it into the fire.
"You'll have to quit that," Tom ordered sternly. "If I catch
you trying to light a cigarette then out you go. We have a man
here sick with lung trouble and with a high fever, and we don't
propose to have any cigarette smoke around here."
"What am I going to do, then?" asked Alf, after a minute or so
spent in a kind of trance.
"Do anything you please, as long as you keep quiet and don't light
any cigarettes," Tom suggested, rummaging in the cupboard for
a medicine chest that he knew was there.
"But I'll go to pieces, if I can't smoke a cigarette or two," whined
the boy.
Tom had the medicine chest in his lap by this time. His hand
touched a bottle of pellets labeled "quassia."
"Here, chew on one of these, and you won't need your cigarette,"
Tom suggested, passing over a pellet.
Alf mutely took the pellet, crushing it with his teeth.
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