"I had been jacking up a gilly of a gafter who had referred to his mother as "the old woman," and I didn't let the four females disturb me. I meant to hold up a looking-glass for that young whelp to look into. I hate a man that don't love his mother.
"Why," says I, "you miserable example of Divine carelessness, do you know what that 'old woman' mother has done for you, you drivelin' idiot, a-thankin' God that you're alive and forgetting the very mother that bore you; if you could see the tears that she has shed, if you could count the sleepless nights that she has put in, the heartaches, the pain, the privation that she has humbly, silently, even thankfully borne that you might simply live, you'd squander your last cent and your last breath to make her life a joy, from this day until her light goes out. A man that don't respect his mother is lost to all decency; a man who will hear her name belittled is a Judas, and a man who will call his mother 'old woman' is a no-good, low-down, misbehaven whelp. Why, damn it, I'd fight a buzz-saw, if it called my mother 'old woman'—and she's been dead a long time; gone to that special, exalted, gilt-edged and glorious heaven for mothers. No one but mothers have a right to expect to go to a heaven, and the only question that'll be asked is, 'Have you been a mother?'
"He was the first man I ever killed."
"Well, sir, I had forgot about the women, but they clapped their hands and I looked around, and there were tears in the eyes of that one woman.
"She got up; came to our table and laid a card by my plate, and said, 'I beg your pardon; but won't you call on me? Please do.'
"I was completely knocked out, but told her I would, and she went out alone; the others finished their breakfast.
"She had no sooner gone than Cy Nash, my conductor, commenced to giggle—'Made a mash on the flyest woman in town,' he tittered; 'ain't a blood in town but what would give his head for your boots, old man; that's Mabel Verne—owns the Odeon dance hall, and the Tontine, in Carson.'