“No hope for you,” says I, “if you’ve got the Mary-Jane infirmity at your age. I thought it wasn’t going to take on you. And patent leather shoes! All this in two little short months!”
“I’m going to marry the young lady who just passed to-night,” says Mack, in a kind of flutter.
“I forgot something at the post-office,” says I, and walked away quick.
I overtook that young woman a hundred yards away. I raised my hat and told her my name. She was about nineteen; and young for her age. She blushed, and then looked at me cool, like I was the snow scene from the “Two Orphans.”
“I understand you are to be married to-night,” I said.
“Correct,” says she. “You got any objections?”
“Listen, sissy,” I begins.
“My name is Miss Rebosa Redd,” says she in a pained way.
“I know it,” says I. “Now, Rebosa, I’m old enough to have owed money to your father. And that old, specious, dressed-up, garbled, sea-sick ptomaine prancing about avidiously like an irremediable turkey gobbler with patent leather shoes on is my best friend. Why did you go and get him invested in this marriage business?”
“Why, he was the only chance there was,” answers Miss Rebosa.