“That was a good place, you could get twenty-five francs for lettin’ a feller into a café out of hours there.”
I have tried to find out what he does in return for Uncle Sam’s dollar a day and have discovered that his job is sweeping out the halls in the M. P. Hotel.
“But I skip about twenty feet at each end every time, so it don’t take me more’n ten minutes.”
Yesterday morning he came in with an air of righteousness rewarded.
“I told ’em I’d got to have help on that job,” he announced, “so they put another feller on too.”
This morning I got so exasperated with him that I told him in unmistakable terms that we could dispense with his company. He disappeared, and I congratulated myself that we were rid of him. But at supper-time he bobbed serenely up again.
“Some fellers would have got sore if you’d spoke like that to them,” he told me with a magnanimous air, “but I just took it as a joke.”
Now what is one to do with anybody like that?
The Fattest M. P. is the most unleavened lump of good-nature I have ever known. He is, I understand, a notorious poker-player and his breath, to my embarrassment, betrays the fact that he has a weakness for Conflans beer. Besides which, he really takes up quite too much room behind the counter. Yet in spite of all this, he is such a simple soul and is so anxious to help that one hasn’t the heart to send him away.
Yesterday I thought I was going to be arrested by an M. P. I had gone over to Verdun in an army flivver to get some stock. Turning the corner into Conflans on our way home we were halted by the upraised billy of the M. P. on duty.