I shook my head.
“You nev—You don’t—You ain’t ever—” Ike took another drag at the gingerbread, and swallowed hard. “Why, the Snohomish Glutton is known—the Snohomish Glutton, he has eat at one setting—Oh, shucks, if you ain’t ever heard, what’s the use!” He started on, but whirled and came back and shook the hunk of gingerbread under my nose. “I suppose if it had been writ and printed in a book you Eastern perfessers would know all about it. Thank God, in the West we know a lot of things that ain’t printed in a book!” Then he stumped away.
Well, I concluded I would stroll along to the galley and take a look at the cook, and be able thereafter to say that at least I had seen this notable of the Pacific.
There was a spacious galley on the old Zizania. I looked in through an open window which commanded the port alley. A fat man was chopping kindlings. He was a thing of rolls and folds of fat—a gob of a man. There were narrow slits near his nose marking his eyes, but his eyes seemed to be shut by fat. A little, round, pursed-up mouth was in the middle of his face, and from this came wheezy grunts as he chopped.
While I was watching him, an object bounded into the galley door and leapfrogged him, darting past me through the window. Before I could turn my head the thing, whatever it was, had disappeared around the corner of the alley.
The cook straightened up, and by an effort opened his eyes enough to stare at me. I expected a deep, gruff voice, But he had a real tin-whistle pipe.
“What did you throw at me?”
“I didn’t throw anything. Something rushed through the galley—I didn’t see what.”
“Things don’t hit a man unless they are thrown,” he insisted. “I may look funny, but I ain’t funny. I don’t relish having things thrown at me.”
He gave up trying to hold his eyes open, and went on chopping.