"I've a morbid horror of lockjaw," he explained. "I never get a jag from a pin but I see myself in the shape of a hoop, semicircular, with my head on one end of a table, my heels on the other, and a doctor standing on my navel trying to reduce the curvature."
"Gosh!" said Partan, who was a literal fool, "is that the treatment they purshoo?"
"That's the treatment!" said Tarmillan, sizing up his man. "Oh, it's a queer thing lockjaw! I remember when I was gold-mining in Tibet, one of our carriers who died of lockjaw had such a circumbendibus in his body that we froze him and made him the hoop of a bucket to carry our water in. You see he was a thin bit man, and iron was scarce."
"Ay, man!" cried Partan, "you've been in Tibet?"
"Often," waved Tarmillan, "often! I used to go there every summer."
Partan, who liked to extend his geographical knowledge, would have talked of Tibet for the rest of the evening—and Tarmie would have told him news—but Allan broke in.
"How's the book, Tarmillan?" he inquired.
Tarmillan was engaged on a treatise which those who are competent to judge consider the best thing of its kind ever written.
"Oh, don't ask me," he writhed. "Man, it's an irksome thing to write, and to be asked about it makes you squirm. It's almost as offensive to ask a man when his book will be out as to ask a woman when she'll be delivered. I'm glad you invited me—to get away from the confounded thing. It's become a blasted tyrant. A big work's a mistake; it's a monster that devours the brain. I neglect my other work for that fellow of mine; he bags everything I think. I never light on a new thing, but 'Hullo!' I cry, 'here's an idea for the book!' If you are engaged on a big subject, all your thinking works into it or out of it."