The Moonlit Road - The Hall Of Wonders

Written by Thomas E. Fuller

It was in March of 1867, after the Civil War was truly lost, that Dr. Rembrandt Cavanagh arrived in Charleston. He was what folks used to call a "carpetbagger" - a Yankee who came down South after the War looking for easy pickin's. Folks remembered him as a slim, elegant man, with one blue eye and one green, and the sharpest, whitest teeth anyone ever saw.

Street

Now Dr. Cavanagh was an apothecary, a provider of prescriptions, potions, and pills. He set up operations down near the docks, figurin' to provide services to the sailors off the Union warships that still filled the harbor as well as selling overpriced drugs to the townspeople of what was left of Charleston. But his plan didn't work. The sailors and soldiers had their own apothecaries, and most of the townsfolk were flat broke.

Now an ordinary man would have cut his losses and headed out West. But Dr. Cavanagh wasn't an ordinary man. He had a mind as bright and fractured as the gears of a nickel-plated watch. He set all those gears and wheels turning and they ticked and ticked and ticked until finally his blue eye flashed and his green eye flashed and his white teeth shone like a shark's. To sell things he had to give people a good reason to come into his shop. He needed a gimmick.

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