"I suppose this will finish me," says he, tacklin' the eggs and corn muffins.
Now, wouldn't that give you the pip? Why, with their specialists and medicated dope, they'd got the old chap so leery of good straight grub that he was bein' starved to death. And even after I'd got him braced up into something like condition, he didn't think it was hardly right to go on eatin'.
"I expect I ought to go back and start in on that slop diet again," says he.
I couldn't stand by and see him do that, though. He was too fine an old sport to be polished off in any such style. "See here, Commodore," says I, "if you're dead stuck on makin' a livin' skeleton of yourself, why, I throws up me hands. But if you'll stay here for a couple of weeks and do just as I say, I'll put you in trim to hit up the kind of life I reckon you think is worth livin'.
"By glory!" says he, "if you can do that I'll—"
"No you won't," say I. "This is my blow."
Course, it was a cinch. He wa'n't any invalid. There was stuff enough in him to last for twenty years, if it was handled right. He begun to pick up right away. I only worked him hard enough to make the meals seem a long ways apart and the mattress feel good. Inside of a week I had the red back in his cheeks, and he was chuckin' the medicine ball around good and hard, and tellin' me what a scrapper he used to be when he first went to the cadet mill, down to Annapolis. You can always tell when these old boys feel kinky—they begin to remember things like that. Before the fortnight was up he wasn't shyin' at anything on the bill of fare, and he was hintin' around that his thirst was comin' back strong.
"Can't I ever have another drink?" says he, as sad as a kid leavin' home.
"I'd take as little as I could get along with," says I.
"I'll promise to do that," says he.