"I've read about you in the papers," says I.
"Not so often as I used to read about you," says he.
And say, inside of ten minutes we was like a couple of G. A. R. vets, at a reunion. Then he told me all about the medicated-milk business.
It didn't take any second sight to see that the Commodore was a gay old sport. He'd been on the European station for three years, knockin' around with kings and princes, and French and Russian naval officers that was grand dukes and such when they was ashore; and he'd carried along with him a truck-driver's thirst and the capacity of a ward boss. The fizzy stuff he'd stowed away in that time must have been enough to sail a ship on. I guess he didn't mind it much, though, for he'd been in pickle a long time. It was the seventeen-course night dinners and the foreign cooking that gave him the knockout.
All of a sudden his digester had thrown up the job, and before he knew it he was in a state where a hot biscuit or a piece of fried potato would lay him out on his back for a week. He'd come home on sick leave to visit his daughter, and his rich son-in-law had steered him up against a specialist who told him that if he didn't quit and obey orders he wouldn't last three weeks. The orders was to live on nothin' but medicated milk, and for a man that had been livin' the way he had it was an awful jolt. He couldn't be trusted to take the stuff himself, so they hired valets to keep him doped with it.
"I scared the first one half to death," says the Commodore, "and the next one I bribed to smuggle out ham sandwiches. Then they got this fellow Babbitt to follow me around with that cursed gocart, and I haven't had a moment's peace since. He's just about equal to a job like that, Babbitt is. I make him earn his money, though."
You'd have thought so if you could have seen the old Commodore work up games to throw Babbitt off the track. I put in most of the day watchin' 'em at it, and it was as good as a vaudeville act. About a quarter of an hour before it was time for the dose the valet would come out and begin to look around the grounds. Soon as he'd located the Commodore he'd slide off after his tea wagon. That was just where the old boy got in his fine work. The minute Babbitt was out of sight the Commodore makes a break for a new hidin' place, so the valet has to wheel that cart all over the lot, playin' peek-a-boo behind every bush and tree until he nailed his man.
Now you'd think most anyone with a head would have cracked a joke now and then with the old gent, and kind of made it easy all round. But not Babbitt. He'd been hired to get medicated milk into the Commodore, and that was all the idea his nut could accommodate at one time. He was one of these stiff-necked, cold-blooded flunkies, that don't seem much more human than wooden Indians. He had an aggravatin' way, too, of treatin' the old chap when he got him cornered. He was polite enough, so far as what he had to say, but it was the mean look in his ratty little eyes that grated.
With every dose the Commodore got madder and madder. Some of the names he thought up to call that valet was worth puttin' in a book. It seemed like a shame, though, to stir up the old gent that way, and I don't believe the medicine did him any more good. He took it, though, because he'd promised his daughter he would. Course, I had my own notions of that kind of treatment, but I couldn't see that it was up to me to jump in the coacher's box and give off any advice.
Next mornin' I'd been out for a little leg-work and I was just joggin' into the park again, when I hears all kinds of a ruction goin' on over behind the stonewall. There was screams and yells and shouts, like a Saturday-night riot in Double Alley. I pokes up a giraffe neck and sees a couple of women runnin' across the lawn. Pretty soon what they was chasin' comes into view. It was the Commodore. He was pushin' the tea-wagon in front of him, and in the top of that, with just his legs and arms stickin' out, was Babbitt.