“Yes, you’re pretty good,” he said to the Candy Butcher, remembering the laugh he got when he came across the tan bark. “But, say, where was you all last week? No lyin’ now, Willie, ’cause I’m on, dead on.”
“Well, I dunno that it’s any secret,” said the Candy Butcher. “I dun me duty an’ I suffered for it.”
The gang looked like a listening party, so he began to reel:
“Say, it’s pretty tough when a fellow starts out to do the right thing by a little lady and gets the flag. It jes’ shows that whenever you gits to dreamin’ good somebody is goin’ to give you an alarm clock finish an’ let you wake up with a shriek. Remember two seasons ago, when we was workin’ the Congress of Nations gag in the manager’s tent? Well, me it is who meets a little lady who is doin’ the bead stitchin’ in the gypsy village. She’s a pretty little thing an’ quietlike. Well, she seems lonesome like an’ one wet night I carries her across the lot when the mud is up to your knees. She seems to like it an’ we has a long talk in the car.
“It seems that she used to work in a bean place where she is called Number 8. I thinks that is funny, so I allus calls her Number 8.
“Seems like her folks was sore on her for troopin’, an’ she comes to me for sympathy. Well, she had me stoppin’ the booze before we was two weeks out, an’ I was gettin’ quiet in me gab and cuttin’ down on the swear talk. She tells me the way she gets into the circus is that a big guy what was engagin’ people for the Congress used to eat his butter cakes at her table, an’ he keeps on tellin’ her what a fine life it is to be an actress, an’, as he has been readin’ about it in books, she throws up the waitin’ job and joins out. The big guy gets half of her first week for the gettin’ her the job.
“But it seems that when Number 8 pulls out of the bean place that she breaks the heart of the guy with the white cap that cooks the buckwheats in the window. He’s been sweet on her from the first day she hollered the hot cakes an’ he pulls ’em off the griddle an’ looks into her eyes. Well, this guy takes a solemn oath that he’ll kill the bloke that makes his Mamie give up waitin’ an’ go troopin’. He never gets next to the big jay what gave her the job, but when he was doin’ the big city he sees me chasin’ her home every night. He gives me a look I don’t like, an’ I asks Number 8 what it means.
“‘Oh, don’t mind him’ she says, ‘he used to belong to my euchre.’