“Well, sakes alive! Banjo, I’m as tickled to see you as if you was one of my own folks,” she declared, her face as warm as if she had just gorged on the hottest of hot dishes which her Mexican cook, Maggie, could devise.
“I’m glad to be able to make it around ag’in, thank you, mom,” Banjo assured her, sentiment and soul behind the simple words. “I always carry a warm place in my heart for Alamito wherever I may stray.”
Nola frisked around and took the banjo from its green cover, talking all the time, pushing and placing chairs, and settling Banjo in a comfortable place. Then she armed him with the instrument, making quite a ceremony of it, and asked him to play.
Banjo twanged the instrument into tune, hooked the toe of his left foot behind the forward leg of his chair, and struck up a song which he judged would please the young ladies. Of Mrs. Chadron he was sure; she had laughed over it a hundred times. It was about an adventure which the bard had shared with his gal in a place designated in Banjo’s uncertain vocabulary as “the big cook-quari-um.” It began:
Oh-h-h, I stopped at a big cook-quari-um
Not very long ago,
To see the bass and suckers
And hear the white whale blow.
The chorus of it ran: