"Throw her wide open and pull up at the nearest road-house," says I to Goggles.
He found one before I'd got all the wraps on Pinckney, and in no time at all we were under the shower. There was less of that marble-slab look about Pinckney when he began to harness up again. He thought he could eat a little something, too. I stood over the block while the man cut that three-inch hunk from the top of the round, and then I made a mortal enemy of the cook by jugglin' the broiler myself. But Pinckney did more than nibble. After that he wanted to turn in. Sleep? I had to lift him out at four G. M. The water-cure woke him, though. He tried to beg off on the last few glasses, but I made him down 'em. Then we starts towards Boston, Goggles behind, and Pinckney discovers the first sunrise he's seen for years.
Well, that's the way we went perambulatin' up into the pie-belt. First we'd jog a few miles, then hop aboard the whiz-wagon and spurt for running water. We didn't travel on any schedule or try to make any dates. Half the time we didn't know where we were, and didn't care. When bath-tubs got scarce we'd hunt for a pond or a creek in the woods. In one of the side-hampers on the car I found a quick-lunch outfit, so I gets me a broiler, lays in round steak and rye bread, and twice a day I does the hobo act over a roadside fire. That tickled Pinckney to death. Nights we'd strike any place where they had beds to let. Pinckney didn't punch the mattress or turn up his nose at the quilt patterns. When it came dark he was glad enough to crawl anywhere.
Now this was all to the good. Never saw quite so much picnic weather rattled out of the box all at one throw. And the work didn't break your back. Why, it was like bein' laid off for a vacation on double pay—until Rajah butted in and began to mix things.
We'd pulled into some little town or other up in Connecticut soon after sun-up, lookin' for soft boiled eggs, when a couple of real gents in last-year ulsters pipes us off and saunters up to the car. They spots Pinckney for the cash-carrier and makes the play at him.
It was a hard-luck symposium, of course; but there was more to it than just a panhandle touch. They were all there was left of the Imperial Consolidated Circus and Roman Menagerie. They had lost their top and benches in a fire, deputy-sheriffs had nabbed the wagons and horses, the company was hoofing back to Broadway, and all they had left was Rajah. Would the honorable gentleman come and take a squint at Rajah?
For why? Well, it was this way: They hated to do it, Rajah being an old friend, just like one of the family, you might say, but there wasn't anything else. They'd just got to hock Rajah to put the Imperial Consolidated in commission again. The worst of it was, these here villagers didn't appreciate what gilt-edged security Rajah was. But his honor would see that the two-fifty was nothing at all to lend out for a beggarly week or so on such a magnificent specimen. Why, Rajah was as good as real estate or Government bonds. As for selling him, ten thousand wouldn't be a temptation. Would the gentlemen just step around to the stable?
It was then I began to put up the odds on Pinckney. I got a wink from them black eyes of his, and there was the very divil an' all in 'em, with his face as straight as a crowbar.
"Certainly," says he, "we'll be happy to meet Rajah."
They had him moored to one of the floor-beams with an ox-chain around his nigh hind foot. He wasn't as big as all out doors, nor he wasn't any vest-pocket edition either. As elephants go, he wouldn't have made the welter-weight class by about a ton. He was what I'd call just a handy size, about two bureaus high by one wide. His iv'ry stoop rails had been sawed off close to his jaw, so he didn't look any more wicked than a foldin'-bed. And his eyes didn't have that shifty wait-till-I-get-loose look they generally does. They were kind of soft, widowy, oh-me-poor-child eyes.