"But have you thought," Drummond pointed out, "that perhaps Filer has committed the instructions to memory?"
Lucy scoffed at this and dismissed it with: "That old lunatic? Never! He can hardly remember the story, and now and then forgets that he's hunting for Baby Jean and hikes back for the desert. Don't worry about his having committed anything to memory. He has no memory to commit it to!"
At about the time the foregoing dialogue was being spoken in Ragtown, Jerkline Jo, in her tent at Julia, was making strange remarks to Hiram Hooker, to wit, as follows:
"Hi-ram! It ti-i-i-ickles! Sto-op-op! Wait a minute, Hiram!"
"Huh!" snorted the unfeeling man. "Whoever heard of anybody being ticklish on the head!"
"But I am, Hiram! I just know I am! And isn't that razor far too sharp?"
"'There ain't no such thing,'" quoted the man out of the store of his masculine experience. "Now quit wiggling, Jo, or I'm liable to cut you."
"Now go slow, Hiram. And if I say it feels funny, you stop. Now easy at first! Horrors! I wouldn't be a man for anything!"
"Don't blame me," mumbled Hiram. "Now quit wrinkling your scalp, Jo. Fella'd think I was going to cut your head off, the way you dodge and shrink."
They were alone in the tent. Jo was on her knees on the ground, and behind her and over her stood Hiram with an old-fashioned razor in his hand. Beside them on a chair lay a strand of almost black hair three feet in length, which Hiram swore that he would preserve until his dying breath. On the back of Jo's head appeared a round spot, covered with hairs half an inch in length, and these the brutal man was trying to shave off with the razor. Never had barber a more provoking customer.