III. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LAME AND THE HALT
I HAD not seen Perkins for over two years, when one day he opened my office door, and stuck his head in. I did not see his face at first, but I recognized the hat. It was the same hat he had worn two years before, when he put the celebrated Perkins's Patent Porous Plaster on the market.
“Pratt's Hats Air the Hair.” You will remember the advertisement. It was on all the bill-boards. It was Perkins, Perkins of Portland, Perkins the Great, who conceived the rhyme that sold millions of the hats; and Perkins was a believer in advertising and things advertised. So he wore a Pratt hat. That was one of Perkins's foibles. He believed in the things he advertised.
“Get next to a thing,” he would say. “Study it, learn to love it, use it—then you will know how to boom it. Take Murdock's Soap. Perkins of Portland boomed it. He bought a cake. Used it. Used it on his hands, on his face, on his feet. Bought another cake—washed his cotton socks, washed his silk tie, washed his woollen underwear. Bought another cake—shaved with it, shampooed with it, ate it. Yes, sir, ate it! Pure soap—no adulteration. No taste of rosin, cottonseed—no taste of anything but soap, and lots of that. Spit out lather for a month! Every time I sneezed I blew a big soap-bubble—perspired little soap-bubbles. Tasted soap for a year! Result? Greatest ad. of the nineteenth century. 'Murdock's Soap is pure soap. If you don't believe it, bite it.' Picture of a nigger biting a cake of soap on every billboard in U. S. A. Live niggers in all the grocery windows biting cakes of Murdock's Soap. Result? Five hundred thousand tons of Murdock's sold the first year. I use no other.” And so, from his “Go-lightly” shoes to his Pratt's hat, Perkins was a relic of bygone favorites in dress. The result was comical, but it was Perkins; and I sprang from my chair and grasped his hand.
“Perkins!” I cried.
He raised his free hand with a restraining motion, and I noticed his fingers protruded from the tips of the glove.
“Say,” he said, still standing on my threshold, “have you a little time?”
I glanced at my watch. I had twenty minutes before I must catch my train.