“You’ve got to hand it to Jimmy,” said Joe, solemnly shaking his head. “There isn’t a place on earth that you could put Jimmy where he wouldn’t have obtained a plentiful supply of doughnuts within a day or two after his arrival. Put him on a cannibal island, and he’d have the king cooking doughnuts for him. Put him up at the North Pole, and he’d hunt up the champion Eskimo doughnut baker and have him on the job in no time. Wonderful, seems to me.”
“Oh, there’s nothing so wonderful about it,” said Bob. “It just goes to show what can be done when you put your heart into a thing. Probably if we hankered after dollars as much as Jimmy hankers after doughnuts, we’d all be millionaires by now.”
“It’s an interesting theory,” laughed Johnson. “I can’t agree to it from my own personal experience, though. I’ve hankered pretty strongly after dollars at various times, and still I haven’t got many of them.”
“That just shows you’ve wanted something else more,” replied Bob, with a grin. “Now, in Jimmy’s case, there isn’t anything that he wants more than doughnuts, so he concentrates on them, and very successfully, too. It’s very seldom that he’s without any.”
“You’re an ungrateful bunch,” complained Jimmy. “Here I go and get the cook to fix up a treat for you, and do I get any thanks for it? None whatever, anywhere, any time, any place! You’ll get me so that I won’t worry about you any more, and then you’ll be out of luck. You know that you couldn’t get along without me to do your thinking for you.”
“Thank heaven we don’t have to rely on your brain work,” remarked Herb. “If we did, we’d all have been done for long ago.”
“All right, let it go at that. Just the same, you’ll eat some of the doughnuts, won’t you?”
“Well, that depends on the cook,” answered Herb. “You try them first, Jimmy, and if they don’t do you any harm, we can try them. If you should die, we’d know enough to leave them alone and no damage would be done.”
Jimmy gave him a withering look, but before he could think of a suitable answer, the receiver clicked and Johnson raised his hand, asking for silence.
“Part of the news reports sent out in compressed form every day, to tell us what’s happening in the States,” he said. “If you fellows listen, you can get the day’s news in tabloid. It’s almost as good as having a newspaper, with the additional advantage that you’re not bothered by the ads.”