“Here. In Connecticut.”
“Why?”
Steve raised a protesting hand.
“Not so early in the day, kid; not before breakfast,” he pleaded. “Honest, I’m not strong enough. It ain’t as if we was a vaudeville team that had got to rehearse.”
“What’s rehearse?”
Steve changed the subject.
“Say, kid, ain’t you feeling like you could bite into something? I got an emptiness inside me as big as all outdoors. How about a mouthful of cereal and a shirred egg? Now, for the love of Mike,” he went on quickly, as his godson opened his mouth to speak, “don’t say ‘What’s shirred?’ It’s something you do to eggs. It’s one way of fixing ’em.”
“What’s fixing?” inquired William Bannister brightly.
Steve sighed. When he spoke he was calm, but determined.
“That’ll be all the dialogue for the present,” he said. “We’ll play the rest of our act in dumb show. Get a move on you, and I’ll take you out in the bubble—the automobile, the car, the chug-chug wagon, the thing we came here in, if you want to know what bubble is—and we’ll scare up some breakfast.”