"Quite right. It wasn't safe. The palm wine itself caused the King to cut a pretty caper now and then; but awfter his mistake, he was far worse—far, far worse. He never got over that, never."
"What happened to him?"
"A most extraordinary thing. I never knew of anything like it in all the world.
"You see, there were two trees which grew close together near the royal palace. One of these was his Majesty's private drinking tree. The other, as it chawnced, was a rubber tree."
Curly deliberately removed his hat and placed it on his knee, wiping, as he did so, a brow dotted thick with moisture. No one broke the silence.
"You will easily understand," resumed the speaker, "that when the King of Gee-Whiz had chopped into the rubber tree with his little gold axe, drinking awfterwards a cupful of pure caoutchouc, it did not take him long to repent of his inadvertence. The results were what I may call most extraordinary. I should judge the rubber juice to have been of very high proof indeed.
"To be brief, I give you my word of honor, the King was turned into an absolutely elastic person on the spot! When he stamped his foot he bounded into the air. 'He's a regular bounder, anyway,' said Sir Harry, who would always have his joke. 'And,' said he to me, as I remember distinctly, 'if his conscience becomes elastic, we're gone, the same as Cook and Morgenstern.' Sir Harry was a great wit.
"Now, the more furious the King became, the more helpless he became as well. He simply bounced up and down and around and about. Reigning monarch, too—lack of dignity—all that sort of thing—must have been most annoying to him. We could do nothing to calm him. In all my travels, I have never seen such a state of affairs; I haven't, really."
"Nor me neither," said Billy Hudgens, sighing, "and I've kept bar from Butte to El Paso."
"Then what happened?" demanded Curly.