“You’ve been so awfully sympathetic about my sleeping sickness, Mart, that I just can’t bear to see you troubled like this. It would certainly be a load off my mind if you’d just talk things over with the doctor—”
“You did it!” hissed Martin. “You—you played a trick on me!”
“Why, Mart,” protested Bob in hurt tones. “How can you sit there and say them cruel words?”
Martin glared wildly about him. Joe was so entirely overcome by some emotion that he had his head in his hands and Willard was gasping, perhaps with pain, his countenance hidden behind a propped-up book. Martin swallowed hard once, drew his feet beneath him and then was out of his chair with a roar.
“I’ll onion you!” he shouted. “I’ll—I’ll—”
Around the table they plunged, hurdling Joe’s legs, since that youth was too helpless to draw them back, twirling Willard around in his chair like a chip in a maelstrom as they passed, Bob a half circuit to the good at the end of each lap. Noise and confusion reigned supreme, but through it came Bob’s voice, made faint by laughter:
“For the love of Mike, Mart, use discretion!”
Martin’s invariable reply was a savage howl of wrath.
On the tenth circuit—or perhaps it was the eleventh!—disaster overtook the pursued. Bob slipped coming into the backstretch and went down, and Martin hurled himself on him. Over and over they went, grunting, gasping, gurgling. Willard rescued the lamp just before the table went over on top of the battlers, showering them with books and papers. Had Bob been in his best form that contest would have been brief, for he was bigger and stronger than his antagonist, but laughter drugged him and before he could cry for mercy Martin had thumped his head many times on the rug and jounced merrily up and down on his ribs. When, at last, Martin drew off and Bob climbed weakly to his feet the room was a wreck and over the scene hung, like a horrible miasma, the sickening concentrated odor of onions!
Martin sniffed and would have flung himself on Bob again if the latter had not pointed beseechingly to the floor. Martin looked and picked up the stoppered remains of a broken bottle. To it clung a paper label. “Onion Extract,” he read.