“’Smatter, son?” inquired the Spanish War vet.
“’Smatter, pop! There’s seven pounds the matter! Uncle Sam can do without me.”
Mrs. Francis came into the room and heard the depressing news of her short-weight son, and straightway conspiracy stalked silently upon the scene. Says the writer in the Sun:
A moment later a significant look passed between father and mother above and back of the bowed head of their son. Mr. and Mrs. Francis withdrew to the kitchen for a council of war. Then Spanish-American War Veteran Joe Francis walked into the front room again and stood before his underweight offspring.
“Take off our pants, Walter,” said Francis, senior, “And give me your—don’t sit there staring at me; get busy—give me your shoes. Ma, catch the boy’s pants when I throw ’em out to you. Lock his pants and shoes up with all his other pants and then start in cooking. Cook up everything you got in the house. And when you get a chance run down to Gilligan’s and tell him to send up five pounds of dried apples.”
“I’m on, pop!” suddenly shouted Embryo Admiral Walter Francis, springing to his feet alive once more. “You’re going to feed me up for a couple of weeks so I’ll make the weight. Gosh, you’re there with the bean, pop—I never woulda thought of the scheme.”
“For a couple of weeks!” cried Parent Francis scornfully. “For a couple of days, you mean, son. Come on into the dining-room and start right in to——. No, stay right where you are. Don’t move from now on unless you have to or you might lose another ounce. You just sit right there all day. Ma will do the cooking and I’ll be the waiter. And if you’re not up to weight inside of three days then I’m a German spy. And don’t weaken. Just keep in mind that even if you do it won’t get you anything. For I’m going to keep the key to all your pants right in my pocket till you cripple the weighing scales. So all you’re going to do from now on is stick around and eat.”
Already Mrs. Francis had passed into the room a nightshirt and a three-quart pitcher brimming with sparkling Croton. Without a pause Parent Francis had filled a tumbler and passed it on to his offspring, who eagerly drained the glass. Tumbler after tumbler of water was tumbled into the digestive system of the underweight linotyper, while steadily from the kitchen came the happy sizzling of four pork chops and fast-frying potatoes with trimmings.
Twenty-one glasses of water disappeared into young Walter Francis before Saturday’s sun had set, together with all the pork chops, the fried potatoes, thick slices of buttered bread, and some other snacks.
The Sunday treatment included fourteen glasses of water and a general packing-in of fattening fodder, until dinner-time arrived, when son Walter was fed up on two pounds of steak smothered in boiled potatoes with trimmings of stewed corn and mashed turnips, all resting on a solid foundation of well-buttered bread and roofed with a generous slab of apple pie. And then: