[“‘Did it just come natural for you to make poetry?’”]
“Doc laughed scornfully. ‘I thought it was something difficult,’ he says. ‘But that’s an easy one for the Choctaw Poet, that is. Why, gentlemen, I assure you—’ But I was humping up and down on my toes the way I did when courting the Muse and saying ‘Ugh! Ugh!’ which was all the Indian I knew for ‘Nothing doing!’ And the Doc got on to the fact that I wasn’t over pleased with the job. So says he, ‘While the Poet is polishing up his pome we’ll have some music from the orchestra.’ Well, the orchestra, which was a banjo, guitar, and accordion, gave them some rag-time and I kept on dancing around on my toes and doing a lot of hard thinking. I wanted to throw up my job pretty bad right then, I tell you. But Doc was scowling hard at me and the big, lanky farmer was grinning up like a catfish. The orchestra got through and I was trying to make Doc see that I wanted more time for contemplation when the rhyme came to me. It wasn’t much of a one, but it had to do. So I stopped dancing and looked scornful at the farmer. And says I:
“‘At a dollar a bottle it’s cheap, you know,
But you are in luck, Mr. Humphrey;
It’s six for five to you, and so
You see you are getting some free.’”
“That was fine!” cried Chub above the laughter. “Did he buy the medicine?”
“He had to,” answered Billy. “He claimed that the rhyme ought to have been one word, but Doc quoted authorities to him so fast he couldn’t answer. You couldn’t very often feaze the Doc. Besides, we had the crowd with us. So Mr. Humphrey gave up his five dollars and went off growling with six bottles of Great Indian. I don’t know how much good it did him; anyhow, it couldn’t do him any harm, I guess, for it was mostly licorice and water. We had a big sale that evening.”
“Was that before you joined the circus?” asked Chub with elaborate carelessness, nudging Roy.
“Yes, several years,” answered Billy. “I wasn’t with the Great Indian Medicine Company more’n six weeks.”