Thus advised, Donlan approached his boss and inquired the whereabouts of the washroom.
“Go down the hall,” said the foreman, “and take the first turn to the right, and the second door you come to after that is the door to the lavatory.”
Donlan undertook to follow instructions but he made a mistake. In the darkness he took the turn to the left instead of the right-hand turn, and, opening the second door, stepped into the elevator shaft and struck with a bump on the ground floor below.
Presently he came back upstairs. He was sweeping up rubbish when O’Day, his buddy, asked him where was the washroom.
Donlan gave him the direction as he remembered it, and, as O’Day turned to go, he called out to him:
“But say, Larry, look out for the top step—it’s a son-of-a-gun!”
§ 295 Obstructing the Highway
There is a corner in a Southern state, down near the Mississippi River, where formerly lynchings occurred more frequently than they do these times. In the days before the rural-free-delivery system was adopted, Uncle Gip Thomas held the contract for delivering the mail in this neighborhood. So regular was he that the residents almost could set their clocks by him.
But one day he was nearly two hours late in reaching the end of the line, where there was a tiny cross-roads hamlet. Just as the citizens were forming a posse to set out in search of him, in fear that some mishap had befallen him, Uncle Gip ambled into view.
“What delayed you, Uncle Gip?” asked the postmaster. “Did you happen to an accident or did an accident happen to you?”