The man who wanted milk imitated the action of one milking a cow, meanwhile mooing plaintively, and then, to round out the illustration, went through the pantomime of emptying an imaginary glass. Still the waiter stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Hold on,” said the artist, “I’ve got an idea. I can draw about as well as the next one. Lend me a pencil; it won’t take me a minute to make this fellow understand.”
With the pencil, on the table cloth, he sketched rapidly what seemed to him a very graphic likeness of a domestic cow, and, squatted down alongside the cow, his conception of a conventional milkmaid engaged in the act of milking.
As he made the finishing strokes the waiter, who had been watching the operation over his shoulder, burst into a delighted cry of “Sí! Sí! Señor!” and, tucking up his apron, dashed from the restaurant and ran across the street into the shop of a tobacconist.
“Now, then,” said the artist to his friend, “see what a knack with the pencil will do for a fellow when he gets into difficulties in a foreign country? I’ll venture I could go all over the world, making my meaning clear by dashing off these little illustrations.”
“Maybe so,” said the newspaper man, “but why in thunder did the waiter go to a cigar store for milk?”
“Probably a custom of the country,” said the artist. “The main point was that just as soon as he’d had a good look at my drawing he was on his way. He’ll be back here in a minute with your glass of milk.”
The prediction was only partly true. The waiter was back again in a minute or less, but he brought no milk. Triumphantly, he laid down in front of his patrons two tickets for a bull-fight.
§ 169 To the Depths of Dogology
It was back in 1899 that State Senator William Goebel seized the Democratic nomination for Governor of Kentucky and, so doing, split the party in the state to flinders. The feuds born of that fight are still alive to-day after the lapse of more than twenty-three years. It was my fortune as a reporter from a Louisville paper to follow the story of the conflict.