But Herman couldn’t sleep. Every ten minutes he would wake up and say “Splinters.” Finally our hero, first crossing himself three times, peeled back the bed covers from his sleeping consort. Madam Pupick was partial to the kind of night shirts they bury sailors in who have died at sea.
For a moment Herman was almost discouraged. But a strange impulse had mastered him. Gingerly he lifted up the night dress until he had exposed Madam Pupick’s knee. At this point, the kippered herring at his side opened one of its glims and sensing danger, let out a terrible squawk.
“Herman! What are you doing,” she shrieked.
“I dreamed you had a splinter in your knee,” Herman mumbled with a guilty start, “and I was going to take it out.”
Madam Pupick stared at him with watery eyes and yanked the bed covers into their proper position. She was a daughter of Eve, but her father was a mackerel.
Thus was the first thread woven in the maelstrom of passion which was to trip our hero and singe his wings. For all that night he tossed on his bed like a Mexican jumping bean.
He dreamed he was kneeling before a beautiful window and watching a windmill made of splinters turning around outside and on top of the windmill was a large snake. Then slowly in his dream the windmill and the snake did a fadeout and he found himself looking at Cutie’s knee just as he had seen it in the Methodist Book Store.
In the middle of the night Herman woke up with a yell. He had kicked all the covers off and was standing in the middle of the bedroom. As his senses returned our hero felt that something had happened. And he remembered all of a sudden that he had forgotten his hat in the book store.
Falling to his knees, Herman put the tips of his fingers together and, his eyes rolling, raised his voice in a grim unfaltering song.
“Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to War....
With the Cross of Jesus——”