He looked at me with dull eyes, when I went in. I did not see Burton at first. He was sitting on my desk, holding a flat can in his hand, and digging out with a wooden toothpick one sardine after another and bolting them whole.
"Your good health," he said, poising one in the air, where it threatened oily tears over the carpet. "As an appetite-quencher and thirst-producer, give me the festive sardine. How lovely it would be if we could eat 'em without smelling 'em!"
"Don't you do anything but eat?" Wardrop asked, without enthusiasm.
Burton eyed him reproachfully. "Is that what I get for doing without lunch, in order to prove to you that you are not crazy?" He appealed to me. "He says he's crazy—lost his think works. Now, I ask you, Knox, when I go to the trouble to find out for him that he's got as many convolutions as anybody, and that they've only got a little convolved, is it fair, I ask you, for him to reproach me about my food?"
"I didn't know you knew each other," I put in, while Burton took another sardine.
"He says we do," Wardrop said wearily; "says he used to knock me around at college."
Burton winked at me solemnly.
"He doesn't remember me, but he will," he said. "It's his nerves that are gone, and we'll have him restrung with new wires, like an old piano, in a week."
Wardrop had that after-debauch suspicion of all men, but I think he grasped at me as a dependability.
"He wants me to go to a doctor," he said. "I'm not sick; it's only—" He was trying to light a cigarette, but the match dropped from his shaking fingers.