“Don’t, Doc.!” says I. “That nerve’s always been a friend of mine until lately. Wouldn’t dopin’ it do?”
He says it wouldn’t, that nothin’ less’n capital punishment would reform a nerve like that; so I tells him to blaze away. No use goin’ into details. Guess you’ve been there.
“Say, Doc.,” says I once when he was fittin’ a fresh auger into the machine, “you ain’t mistakin’ me for the guilty party, are you?”
“Did I hurt?” says he.
“You don’t call that ticklin’, do you?” says I.
But he only grins and goes on with the excavation. After he’s blasted out a hole big enough for a terminal tunnel he jabs in a hunk of cotton soaked with sulphuric acid, and then tamps down the concrete.
“There!” says he, handin’ me a drug store drink flavored with formaldehyde. “In the course of forty-eight hours or so that nerve will be as dead as a piece of string. Meantime it may throb at intervals.”
That’s what it did, too! It dies as hard as a campaign lie. About every so often, just when I’m forgettin’, it wakes up again, takes a fresh hold, and proceeds to give an imitation of a live wire on an alternatin’ circuit.
“Ahr chee!” says Swifty Joe. “To look at the map of woe you’re carryin’ around, you’d think nobody ever had a bum tusk before.”
“Nobody ever had this one before,” says I, “and the way I look now ain’t chronic, like some faces I know of.”