Fresh Every Hour: Detailing the Adventures, Comic and Pathetic of One Jimmy Martin, Purveyor of Publicity, a Young Gentleman Possessing Sublime Nerve, Whimsical Imagination, Colossal Impudence, and, Withal, the Heart of a Child.Toohey, John Peter
General
Fresh Every Hour: Detailing the Adventures, Comic and Pathetic of One Jimmy Martin, Purveyor of Publicity, a Young Gentleman Possessing Sublime Nerve, Whimsical Imagination, Colossal Impudence, and, Withal, the Heart of a Child.
Toohey, John Peter
Press agents -- Fiction
He burst through the entrance to the enclosure and ran along a
passageway into the private office of Signor Amado himself. That
ferocious looking worthy was, at the moment, delivering a philippic to
his principal assistant, a pungent diatribe directed against the press,
press agents, stupid park managements and the inherent injustice of
mankind in general. At the sight of the wild-eyed and blood-stained
visitor from an alien clime in the doorway, he passed in the middle of a
sentence. His jaw dropped and his face turned ghastly white. He ducked
behind a desk and mumbled a fervid appeal to the patron saint of his
native village in Lombardy. The visitor looked around for something to
destroy. His gaze encountered a half empty bottle of Chianti on a table
and he sprang for it with the fierce avidity of a lion leaping at his
prey from ambush. The contents of the bottle were gurgling down his
throat to the accompaniment of half-choked chuckles of delight when the
pursuing mob closed in a few seconds later and quelled the revolution.
McClintock rushed in as the special policemen were putting a pair of
handcuffs on the would be Trotsky. Signor Amado, arising from behind the
desk, confronted him.
“Whatafor you leta theese fella in here, eh?” he cried belligerently,
his old pose of aggressiveness automatically asserting itself at the
sight of the pinions which held the savage intruder safely bound.
McClintock laughed at the sheer absurdity of this remark.
“We didn’t let him in any place, Tony,” he replied. “He just happened to
drop in here and several places along the line before we could catch up
with him.”
“Whata make him so bada man, er?” inquired the animal trainer.
“Booze, Tony, plain old-fashioned booze. They tell me he picked up a
bottle on the beach some one must have dropped off an excursion boat.
These fellows can’t stand intoxicants of any kind. It makes ’em wild. I
see he’s been cutting into your Chianti.”
He gave orders for the temporary bestowal of the now thoroughly
chastened and mollified revolutionary, and was following the latter’s
captors out of the office when Signor Amado plucked him by the sleeve.
“Say, meester,” inquired the latter. “You geta my face in de papers
tomor’, eh?”
The manager shook his head.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible—that is tomorrow,” he replied. “I
told you this morning we’d do the very best we could to work up another
story about you next week when this monkey yarn was sort of died down.
Then we’ll see what we can do about landing your picture right. Don’t
worry. Leave it all to me.”
Signor Amado assumed a defiant attitude.
“I giva you—what you call, eh?—a warning. You have my face in alla de
papers tomor’ or, by dam, I feexa de park gooda.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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