“It’s a cinch if you can hold onto him, eh?” says I.
“Oh, I can hold him all right,” says Chunk, waggin’ his head confident. “I know enough about human nature to be sure of that. Of course, he’s an odd freak; but this sort of thing will grow on him. The oftener he gets a hand like that, the more he’ll want it, and inside of a fortnight that’ll be what he lives for. Oh, I know people, from the ground up, inside and outside!”
Well, I was beginnin’ to think he did. And, havin’ been on the inside of his deal, I got to takin’ a sort of pride in this hit, almost as much as if I’d discovered the Captain myself. I used to go up about every afternoon to see old Spiller do his stunt and get ’em goin’. Gen’rally I’d lug along two or three friends, so I could tell ’em how it happened.
Last Friday I was a little late for the act, and was just rushin’ by the boxoffice, when I hears language floatin’ out that I recognizes as a brand that only Chunk Tracey could deliver when he was good and warm under the collar. Peekin’ in through the window, I sees him standin’ there, fairly tearin’ his hair.
“What’s up, Chunk?” says I. “You seem peeved.”
“Peeved!” he yells. “Why, blankety blank the scousy universe, I’m stark, raving mad! What do you think? Spiller has quit!”
“Somebody overbid that hundred a week?” says I.
“I wish they had; then I could get out an injunction and hold him on his contract,” says Peter K. “But he’s skipped, skipped for good. Read that.”
It’s only a scrawly note he’d left pinned up in his dressin’ room, and, while it ain’t much as a specimen of flowery writin’, it states his case more or less clear. Here’s what it said:
Mister P. K. Tracey;