“Well, she’s gone for good this time, boys, and I’m all in.” The listeners groaned.
“Have you tried to get her back?” asked Higgins.
“I’ve tried in every way, but she hides from me, and says she hates me. Oh, God! What shall I do? I can’t get along without my queen. I love her, boys. I love her more than my soul, and God knows I treated her well,” said Percy, dropping into a chair and mopping his brow; “but I won’t live long, boys. I feel the last string of my heart giving way. I’m a goner. I don’t want to live. I have a little bottle of poison in my pocket right now, and if my heart don’t break soon, I’ll take it and shuffle off.”
“How long have you been married to the lady?” asked John Hogan.
“Three years,” said Percy, with a long-drawn sigh.
“You ought to be pretty tired of her by this time,” said Iky Gillstein. “If I had a woman around the house with me for three years I’d be darned glad to get rid of her.”
“You’re a brute, Iky,” said Bill Wiley, “and you ain’t got no more heart than a woman. I kin put myself in your place, Percy; I’ve been through it, boy. Why, when that lady that I married throwed me down, two years ago, I couldn’t eat, sleep, nor think. If it hadn’t been for Higgins an’ Hogan, I’d ‘a’ gone mad, an’ took poison, an’ God knows I had poison enough in my system. What’s love but poison?”
“Love is a loco germ, Bill,” said Percy dramatically, “an’ when it enters a fellow’s system it ain’t any use squirmin’. He might as well take his medicine.”
“Love left many a man in a darned bad stew,” said John Hogan, “an’ a guy that ’ud fall in love twice ought to be put in the bughouse.”
“I’ve been there many a time,” said Percy. “That time I was in the Jameson raid in South Africa. I wouldn’t have been in it if I hadn’t been bad stuck on a girl that threw me down.” The listeners coughed and exchanged glances. They had heard many times of the Jameson raiders from Percy, and they had even seen the marks on his feet where he had been tied up by his heels.