Olliphant fell back in his chair, slack of jaw, and it is doubtful, had anyone been able to apprise him of the truth of the matter, that he'd have felt any better about it. To a man in his cups, as Olliphant was, the news does not come lightly that he is in the company of a thirsty ghost, with an unerring nose for whiskey, and a predisposition for celebration.

Olliphant watched in bleary disbelief as the bottle repeated the tilting and emptying process. Then his mood began to change. Regardless of what this obviously demented bottle thought it was up to, it had no right to deplete his private reserves in this callous fashion. The slack jaw of Olliphant Gunn hitched itself up and became firm.

"Stop that!" Olliphant roared. "You stop that right now, damnit!"

For a moment the bottle wavered, as though startled, then defiantly upended a third time and brought the level of the coveted liquor down still further. Quite as though to rub salt in the wound, it burped with grandiose satisfaction.

"Damnation!" Olliphant gasped. "I'll teach you, you blathering bottle!"

Heaving his considerable bulk up out of his chair, he hurled himself bodily toward the object of his wrath.

The laws of nature, however, were against Olliphant from the very beginning. As the bottle darted out of his reach, sheer momentum carried him headlong into the dim reaches of Salts and Syrups. Gravity delivered him along with a quantity of gummy liquid and gritty crystallines to the floor. Settled in a sticky puddle of wreckage, Olliphant glanced around with a reddish, enraged expression. Besides salt and syrup, there was blood in his eye.

At a distance sufficiently out of reach, yet insultingly near, the bottle was bobbing about amusedly. Indeed, Olliphant distinctly heard a soft chuckling sound coming from its direction. With a jungle roar he surged up from the floor and launched a second attack. This netted him another disastrous collision, this time with the glassware department. The Pharmacy was swiftly being transformed into a scene of chaos.

In the interval, the bottle had retreated to a position by the doorway and was humming maddeningly to itself. Suddenly it burst into full-throated song.

"Goin' to Louisiana," it warbled, "for a case of good whis-kee! Goin' to Louisiana with a hussy on mah knee!"

Olliphant 

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