“‘Have you such a thing as a plug of terbackker in your possession?’
“‘Yes,’ says he, surprised. ‘I have.’
“‘Well,’ says I, ‘ruther than to further add to your troubles, I’ll break my word to a lady—gimme that plug! We haven’t come to this—this has come to us.’
“So I explained, and he opened his stock exchange. I reckon he was right about the bad effects of chewin’-gum, too, or maybe what’s a medal winner in N’ York ain’t art west of the Missouri. Anyhow, you don’t hear me kickin’ about that nice missionary young lady. If I cared for joolry, I’d be wearin’ that tin-horn’s diamon’ chest protector right now. Gum has different effects on different people. ’Twas fatal to his constitooshun.”
XI
BLESSED BE THE PEACEMAKERS
THE QUEST FOR QUIET ON THE PART OF THE HUMAN CONCERTINA
“The peaceful season has come around again,” said Mr. Scraggs. “It does that every year. It is a good thing to have a certain date to be peaceful on; you prepare for it, put all troublesome things away, and wind up, as I usually do, with four friends trying to hold me down because I feel so light in the head.
“Peace is one of the finest things on earth, but the makin’ of it will never be confined to one of these here monopolies. Listen! What better could a man do than go into a home being tore wide open by the dissensions and discussions of one husband and one wife, using such domestic articles as flat-irons, coal-scuttles, brooms and the like of that, upon each other, and extract from the dust one large, smooth, round, white hunk of peace? It is nice to think of.
“I remember Long John. He was a feller built on the concertina plan. When he sat down in a chair he didn’t look like a man more’n seven feet high, but when he got up, and up, and more up, he was that kind of build that made little Bill holler, the first time he saw the ack, ‘How much more of you is there down cellar?’ And Bill said to me on the quiet: ‘Old Gabe will have to play an oncore if he expects John to get up before the resurrection is all over.’
“But John had a disposition that couldn’t be beat. He was for peace all the time. Bits of men that wouldn’t more’n come up to his waist used to talk to him as rough as they liked and John wouldn’t give them one word back. He simply hit them a slam, and then there was peace, you bet your life.