Through the film of smoke it loomed vividly dark, impudent, ironic, the mobile mouth edged satirically with a slight smile.
"Are you man or devil ?" he whispered.
Carl laughed.

His hand, for all his drinking, was calm and steady, his handsome eyes clear and cold and resolute.
"Hunch," he said curtly, "if you touch that bottle again, I'll break it over your head.

You're drunk now." To Jokai his voice trailed off into curious nothingness.

Somewhere he knew in a room stifling hot and hazy with the fumes of vile tobacco there was a voice, musical, detached and very far away.
"Monsieur," it was saying, "there are still the questions." With shaking hand Jokai touched a metal king and screamed.

The heat and the hell-board hard upon his days and nights of enforced drinking were too much.