“Now, if I’d been wise I’d a-known Number 8 was connin’, for what did that little fairy know about euchre parties? I knows now that she was pullin’ off some speech she heard in the theatre where the lady shoots the dook across the card table because he brings the coachman into the parlor to get a drink while the other dook is sayin’ his good-by speech. I is too sweet on the fairy then to know that she’s connin’ me.
“Well, jes’ the last week we was playin’ New York, who does I meet in the park lookin’ at the fish but Number 8. She looks so sweet an’ nice that it all comes back, an’ me up an’ speaks. She says sorter haughty:
“‘Who are you, sir? Whom are you addressin’?
“Say, that hit me like a blast, when all of a sudden I get a welt across the head wid sumthin’ that is iron. Say, I falls, but is up, and though the knock has given me the blood, I see that it’s the guy what cooks the buckwheats in the window who was tryin’ to do the killin’. An’ say, he has run out of his bean place an’ hit me wid the cake turner. I grasps him, an’ it’s catch-as-catch-can, an’ Number 8 screamin’ on the bench. I gives him a couple of good ones when in a jiffy it’s rainin’ plates an’ coffee cups, an’ I’m gettin, ’em on the face. Say, his whole gang from the bean shop was out in their white coats, throwin’ the crockery an’ me gettin’ it.
“I knows the show is shut up an’ help is a long way off. Somebody yells, ‘Lick the brute,’ an’ I gets another pie plate in the eye.
“‘What’s he done?’ says a cab driver.
“‘He insulted me wife,’ said the buckwheat cake man.
“I tried to explain, but he gives me another one with the cake-turner an’ I’m on the asphalt.
“I’se gettin’ it good, an’ I sees I must get help or cut the season for the city ward. So I yells ‘Hey, Rube!’
“Well, what do you think? There was a couple of old tramps a-sleepin’ on a bench, an’ when they hears me scream, me on me back wid the buckwheat man sittin’ on me, I sees ’em move, I yells it again, an’ one of them wearies says: