"Ain't it nice and roomy back there?" Alex asks me.
I moved my knees away from my chin so's I could talk.
"Great!" I says. "Only the Gaflooey people is liable to get in trouble on account of them coppin' the design from somebody else."
"What d'ye mean?" he asks me, lookin' puzzled.
"Well," I tells him, "you gotta admit that the seatin' arrangements back here is a dead steal from a can of sardines!"
"Did you ever see anything you couldn't find fault with?" he sneers.
"Yeh," I says. "I once got three nickels in change for a dime."
At this critical moment, the mechanic gets down on his hands and knees in the street and begins to worry the car like a dog with a bone. Then all of a sudden he crawls underneath it and disappears from the public eye. A lot of shippin' clerks, bookkeepers, salesgirls, brokers, lawyers and the like, on their way downtown to their jobs, figures that you can go to work any day, but an auto bein' fixed calls for immediate attention and gets around us in a circle. This seemed to get Alex's goat, but it was huckleberry pie to the mechanic. He crawls out from under, rolls up his sleeves, ruffles his hair, looks over the crowd and rubs his hands together.
"Gimme a cigarette!" he says. "And reach down in that tool box there and hand me up them pliers, a couple of S wrenches, the hammer and a screwdriver!"
The crowd sighs with delight, but Alex leaps off the seat like they was bees in the upholstery.