“Knock it over! Somebody knock it over!” A big military-looking man in evening clothes sprang forward. I offered a prayer for him and held my breath. He rushed to the Gasowashine, seized it with his mighty arms, and gave a shove.
“M-m-m-mister,” quavered Hawkins, wriggling from under one of the tables, “don't do that! The g-g-g-gasolene tank!”
But it was done. With a dull crash, the only perfect machine for washing and drying dishes fell to its side. The big man smiled at it.
And then—well, then a sheet of flame seemed to envelope the unfortunate. A heavy boom shook the apartment, the big glass door splintered musically and fell inward, the lights in that end of the room were extinguished.
Then followed the screams of the terrified guests, the patter of numberless fragments of crockery and countless drops of filthy dishwater as they reached the floor. And then the big man picked himself up some twenty feet from the spot where he had dared the wrath of the Gasowashine.
And Hawkins standing majestically in the wreck of a table, with one foot in a salad bowl and the other oozing nesselrode pudding, while an unbroken stream of mayonnaise dressing meandered down the back of his coat—Hawkins, standing thus, shook his fist at the big man and, above the turmoil, shouted at him:
“I told you so!”
Such was the fate of the first, last, and only Gasowashine.
Bellboys, clerks, and waiters pelted with hand grenades its smoldering remains and squirted chemical fire-extinguishers upon it; but the Gasowashine's day was done. Its turbulent spirit had passed to another sphere.
Later, when some measure of order had been restored to the dining-room, when the door had been boarded up and the inquisitive police satisfied and the street crowd dispersed; when a sympathetic waiter had partially cleansed Hawkins, and that gentleman had suggested that we might as well depart, he received a peremptory invitation to call upon the proprietor in his private office.